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THE  FIELD  OF 
PHILOSOPHY 


THE  FIELD  OF 

PHILOSOPHY 

•  • 

AN  INTRODUCTION  TO  THE 
STUDY  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


BY 

JOSEPH  A.  LEIGHTON,  Ph.D.,  LL.D. 

PROFESSOR  OF  PHILOSOPHY  IX  THE  OHIO  STATE  UNIVERSITY, 
AUTHOR  OF  “MAN  AND  THE  COSMOS,”  ETC. 


DEFINITIVE  EDITION 


D.  APPLETON  AND  COMPANY 

NEW  YORK  :  :  1923  :  :  LONDON 


COPYRIGHT,  1923,  BY 

D.  APPLETON  AND  COMPANY 


Copyright,  1918,  1919,  by  Joseph  Alexander  Leighton 
PRINTED  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


PREFACE 


Many  years  experience  in  teaching  introductory  courses 
in  philosophy  led  me  to  conclude,  some  years  ago,  that  the 
best  method  is  a  combination  of  the  historical  and  the  topical 
or  systematic  methods.  A  beginning  course  which  attempts 
to  cover,  in  detail,  the  entire  History  of  European  and 
American  Philosophy  is  beyond  the  grasp  of  most  beginners. 
Thev  are  bewildered  bv  the  constant  succession  of  theories 

%/  % j 

not  easily  distinguishable,  and  become  confused  as  to  the 
fundamental  issues  and  standpoints.  They  fail  to  get  the 
connections  between  philosophy  and  the  general  culture  of 
a  period. 

On  the  other  hand,  a  purely  topical  and  systematic  intro¬ 
duction  does  not  bring  the  student  into  contact  with  the 
most  significant  historical  developments  of  philosophy.  He 
does  not,  in  this  way,  begin  to  see  what  role  philosophy  has 
played  in  the  life  of  civilization. 

The  increasing  lack  of  a  common  cultural  perspective, 
on  the  part  of  students,  makes  it  imperative  to  supply 
something  in  the  way  of  a  historical  background.  I  am  of 
the  opinion  that  a  sketch  of  the  historical  growth  of  Greek 
philosophy  best  meets  this  need,  because  of  the  simplicity 
and  logical  symmetry  and  completeness  with  which  it 
unfolds.  On  the  other  hand,  when  the  student  comes  to  the 
beginning  of  modern  thought  he  immediately  meets  prob¬ 
lems,  concepts  and  theories  that  still  function  largely  in  our 
intellectual  life.  I  have,  therefore,  in  the  present  outline 
presented :  first,  a  rapid  historical  sketch  of  the  develop¬ 
ment  of  occidental  philosophy  from  its  beginnings  up  to 
the  opening  of  modern  thought;  and  have  followed  this 
with  a  more  systematic  and  critical  survey  of  the  chief 


VI 


PREFACE 


modern  problems  and  standpoints,  laying  stress  on  the 
most  recent  forms  of  thought.  The  third  part  of  the  book 
presents,  in  outline,  a  survey  of  the  present  status  of  sys¬ 
tematic  philosophy,  as  I  understand  its  problems  and  their 
interrelationships. 

The  teacher  might,  if  time  be  lacking  to  cover  the  whole 
work,  omit  either  a  large  portion  of  Part  I,  or  he  might 
omit  Part  III.  The  work  is  so  framed  that,  either  the 
historical  development  or  the  present  day  problems  and 
theories,  can  be  stressed.  There  is  some  advantage  either 
way. 

I  first  began  the  preparation  of  this  book  in  the  winter 
of  1917-18,  at  the  suggestion  of  my  then  assistant,  Dr.  R.  D. 
Williams.  Through  his  aid  and  that  of  Dr.  W.  S.  Gamerts- 
felder  I  was  able  to  have  a  large  part  of  it  printed  in 
outline,  for  the  use  of  our  own  classes,  in  the  summer  of 
1918.  A  number  of  other  institutions  adopted  it.  It  be¬ 
came  necessary  to  have  a  much  larger  edition  printed  in 
the  summer  of  1919.  I  took  the  opportunity  then  to  revise 
and  enlarge  it. 

In  preparing  the  present  definitive  edition  for  the  press, 
I  have  thoroughly  revised  the  entire  work.  I  have  re¬ 
written  several  parts.  I  have  added  the  following  chapters : 
The  Introduction — “Philosophy  and  the  Crisis  in  Civiliza¬ 
tion,  ”  “Recent  Realism,”  “  Temporalism,  ”  “Instru¬ 
mentalism,”  and  “Ethics  and  Social  Philosophy.”  I  have 
omitted  the  chapter  on  the  “Fundamental  Concepts  of 
Metaphysics,”  since  the  treatment  was  too  condensed  for 
the  beginner  and  the  subject  is  fully  treated  in  my  book, 
Man  and  the  Cosmos.  I  have  also  omitted  the  Appendix, 
since  the  matters  therein  treated  are  much  more  fully 
discussed  in  the  new  chapters.  The  other  changes  and 
additions  are  too  numerous  to  specify  here.  Dr.  A.  E. 
Avey’s  Readings  in  Philosophy  has  been  prepared  as  a 
companion  source  book. 


PREFACE 


Vll 


I  may  add  that,  before  preparing  this  work  for  the  press 
I  sent  a  questionnaire  to  more  than  a  score  of  experienced 
teachers,  who  had  used  the  work  in  its  earlier  forms.  The 
consensus  of  opinion  was  that  it  would  be  unwise  to  depart 
radically  from  the  general  plan  of  the  work.  I  thank  my 
correspondents  for  the  pains  they  took.  I  am  indebted 
especially  to  Professors  W.  K.  Wright,  A.  R.  Chandler  and 
A.  E.  Avey  for  suggestions. 


Joseph  Alexander  Leighton 


- 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface  .  v 

Introduction — Philosophy  and  the  Crisis  in  Civiliza¬ 
tion  .  1 

PART  I 

THE  CHIEF  PROBLEMS  AND  STANDPOINTS 
OF  GREEK  AND  MEDIEVAL  PHILOSOPHY 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.  Philosophy,  Its  Meaning  and  Scope  ...  25 

II.  Primitive  Thought . 35 

III.  The  Differentiation  of  Philosophy  and 

Science  from  Religion . 50 

IV.  Atomistic  Materialism . 68 

V.  Skepticism  and  Sophistry . 74 

VI.  The  Personality,  Mission  and  Influence  of 

Socrates . 84 

VII  Plato  . 93 

VIII.  Aristotle . 126 

IX.  Stoic  Pantheism . 142 

X.  Mysticism — Neoplatonism . 151 

XI.  Early  Christian  Philosophy . 166 

XII.  Medieval  Philosophy  . 173 

PART  II 

THE  CHIEF  PROBLEMS  AND  STANDPOINTS 
OF  MODERN  PHILOSOPHY 

XIII.  Modern  Philosophy  :  Its  Spirit,  Its  Chief 

Problems  and  Standpoints . 187 

XIV.  The  Problem  of  Reality . 195 

ix 


X 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  pAGE 

XV.  Dualism . •„ . 201 

XVI.  Materialism  . 212 

XVII.  The  Philosophy  of  Kant . 224 

XVIII.  Spiritualism  or  Idealism . 242 

XIX.  The  Identity  or  Double-Aspect  Theory  .  .  272 

XX.  Recent  Realism . 280 

XXI.  Temporalism . 309 

XXII.  Instrumentalism  or  the  New  Pragmatism  .  343 


PART  III 

AN  OUTLINE  OF  THE  CHIEF  PROBLEMS 
OF  CONSTRUCTIVE  PHILOSOPHY 
XXIII.  The  Problem  of  Evolution  and  Teleology  .  371 

XXIV.  SlNGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM  (  THE  ONE  AND  THE 


Many)  . 391 

XXV.  The  Self . 434 

XXVI.  Ethics  and  Social  Philosophy . 456 

XXVII.  The  Status  of  Values . 470 

XXVIII.  The  Philosophy  of  History . 485 

XXIX.  Epistemology . 513 

XXX.  The  Criteria  of  Truth . 531 

XXXI.  Other  Philosophical  Disciplines  ....  544 

XXXII.  Progress  in  Philosophy . 558 

Epilogue . 571 

Index  .  .  .  .  t  .  . . 573 


THE  FIELD  OF 
PHILOSOPHY 


' 


THE  FIELD  OF 
PHILOSOPHY 


INTRODUCTION 

PHILOSOPHY  AND  THE  CRISIS  IN  CIVILIZATION 

Civilization  to-day  seems  to  be  passing  through  one  of  its 
periodic  crises.  Resemblances  may  be  found  between  the 
present  transitional  era  of  culture  and  previous  ones. 
Common  to  all  such  eras  are :  the  dissolution  of  traditional 
systems  of  social  custom  and  belief ;  the  breakdown  of 
inherited  sanctions  in  religion,  morality,  and  law ;  and 
the  consequent  confusion  in  regard  to  social  ethics,  the 
principles  of  government,  and  the  values  and  ends  of  social 
culture. 

The  culture  of  the  fourteenth,  fifteenth,  and  sixteenth 
centuries  in  Western  Europe  exhibited  a  transitional  char¬ 
acter — the  movement  away  from  social  unity  and  the 
authority  of  traditional  forms,  and  towards  a  particular¬ 
istic  conception  of  social  life  and  the  supremacy  of  abstract 
reason ;  that  is,  towards  the  a  priori  construction  of  prin¬ 
ciples  and  ideals  of  social  order,  regardless  of  the  historical 
development  of  social  structures.  This  movement  reached 
its  culmination  in  the  eighteenth  century,  to  give  way,  in  the 
nineteenth  century,  to  the  historical  and  evolutionary 
standpoint. 

Another  great  transitional  era  was  the  long  period  during 

1 


o 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


which  the  culture  of  the  pagan  Roman  Empire  disinte¬ 
grated  and  its  place  was  taken  by  the  Catholic  Christian 
system  of  the  Middle  Ages.  This  period  occupied  about 

one  thousand  years.  Catholic  Christian  culture  reached 

%/ 

its  apogee  in  the  thirteenth  century,  and  began  to  decline 
in  the  fourteenth  century.  A  still  earlier  example  was  the 
transitional  era  of  Greek  culture,  extending  from  the  early 
philosophers  to  the  flourishing  of  the  Stoics.  The  Platonic 
and,  later,  the  Epicurean  and  Stoic  philosophies  took  the 
place  of  tradition  and  custom,  and  furnished  guiding  prin¬ 
ciples  for  the  conduct  of  life.  The  Stoic  philosophy  also 
furnished  inspiration  and  guidance  for  social  administra¬ 
tors  in  the  Roman  Empire  up  to  the  time  of  Marcus 
Aurelius.  It  was  an  ethics  and  a  religion.  Its  influence 
passed  into  Christianity  through  St.  Paul. 

One  might  draw  many  engaging  parallels  between  pre¬ 
vious  transitional  eras  and  the  present  one.  But  one  must 
beware  of  assuming  that  history  repeats  itself  without 
important  variations.  Cultural  history  seems  to  move 
chiefly  in  irregular  spiral  lines.  At  times  it  moves  in 
zigzag  fashion.  The  present  critical  phase  of  civilization 
covers  a  much  vaster  area  than  any  previous  one.  Indeed, 
the  ancient  cultures  of  India  and  China  are  being  sucked 
into  the  maelstrom.  The  present  crisis  likewise  goes  deeper 
than  any  before.  Probably  the  most  revolutionary  occur¬ 
rence  in  human  history,  since  the  discovery  of  fire  making 
and  working  in  metals,  was  the  “Industrial  Revolution,” 
which  began  early  in  the  eighteenth  century,  but  did  not 
reach  full  tide  until  late  in  the  nineteenth  century.  The 
revolution  in  the  methods  of  producing  and  distributing 
material  goods,  the  rise  and  spread  of  social  democracy, 
and  the  triumphant  march  of  natural  science  until  the 
entire  life  of  man  has  been  made  subject  to  its  methods 
and  principles,  are  the  chief  causes  of  the  present  crisis 
in  society.  The  methods  and  results  of  natural  science 


INTRODUCTION 


3 


have  undermined  the  foundations  of  traditional  religion, 
and  have  seemed  to  destroy  the  motives  and  sanctions  of 
social  morality  supplied  by  religious  tradition.  The  rise 
and  spread  of  a  mechanically  industrialized  society,  in 
which  the  only  final  touchstones  of  distinction  are  money 
and  the  power  which  comes  from  the  backing  of  numbers, 
have  tended  to  make  the  crowd-mind  the  arbiter  of  social 
standards  in  education,  art,  manners,  and  morals,  no  less 
than  in  things  economic. 

The  tremendous  development  of  large-scale  machine  pro¬ 
duction  has  put  a  great  and  unwonted  strain  on  the  human 
soul,  which  does  not  derive  any  lasting  satisfaction  from 
the  rapid  and  monotonous  repetition  of  simple  mechanical 
processes.  It  has  also  put  a  great  strain  on  family  life. 
It  has  greatly  modified  social  intercourse.  It  has  resulted 
in  an  attitude  of  nervous  haste  inimical  to  thoughtful  re¬ 
flection.  It  has  lined  up,  in  battle  array,  the  groups  of 
organized  1  ‘capital”  on  one  side  and  organized  “labor” 
on  the  other  side,  with  the  noncombatants  between  to  suffer 
most  of  the  damage  from  their  intermittent  warfare.  The 
comparative  poverty  of  the  worker  is  not  the  sole,  perhaps 
not  even  the  chief,  cause  of  the  persistent  social  unrest. 
I  think  the  latter  comes  largely  as  a  blind  protest  of  the 
soul  of  man  against  a  monotonous  and  mechanized  exist¬ 
ence — against  a  life  in  which  he  toils  without  full  and 
active  mental  participation  in  his  work,  and  in  which  his 
leisure  is  not  spent  in  ways  which  satisfy  the  impulsions 
thwarted  or  repressed  during  his  hours  of  bread  winning 
labor. 

The  comparative  study  of  human  institutions,  customs, 
and  beliefs,  in  the  light  of  evolution,  has  revealed  their 
apparent  and  complete  relativity  to  circumstances ;  so 
that  none  have  more  authority  than  belong  to  convenient 
makeshifts.  Indeed,  the  “newest”  psychologies,  the 
Freudian  and  mechanistic  behaviorism,  teach  us  that 


4 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


human  ideals,  aims,  and  reasons  are  but  conventional 
make-believes  in  which  are  disguised,  for  public  and  so¬ 
cial  intercourse,  by  a  more  or  less  unconscious  hypocrisy, 
the  real  driving  forces  of  human  nature  which  are  the 
biological  mechanisms  of  the  sexual  impulse,  hunger,  grega¬ 
riousness,  the  lust  for  power,  the  possessive  impulse,  et 
cetera. 

A  stable  social  order  is  ruled  chiefly  by  customs  and 
social  habits.  A  society  in  flux  is  one  in  which  the  inherited 
customs  are  challenged.  To-day  there  is  no  inherited  social 
pattern  which  escapes  challenge.  From  the  ethics  of  in¬ 
dustry,  property,  and  sex,  to  the  ethics  of  political  and 
international  relations— everywhere  we  meet  the  note  of 
interrogation.  Even  the  political  institutions  of  represen¬ 
tative  democracy  seem  unable  to  cope  with  the  economic 
class-conflicts  and  the  complex  problems  of  social  ad¬ 
ministration.  Radicals  in  social  theory  (the  Bolshevists), 
propose  the  scrapping  of  all  our  inherited  social  institu¬ 
tions  and  the  dictatorship  of  the  class-conscious  minority 
of  the  proletariat. 

In  this  critical  pass  the  greatest  danger  lies  in  the 
substitution,  for  the  waning  social  patterns  of  belief  and 
conduct,  of  uncriticized  mass-impulses,  crowd-emotions, 
class-passions  and  resentments.  Our  civilization  has  grown 
so  enormously  complex,  so  hurried  and  noisy,  the  indi¬ 
vidual  is  at  once  so  remote  from  the  sources  of  accurate 
information  and  so  jostled  by  the  crowd  that  he  is  apt 
to  fall  an  easy  prey  to  the  first  suggestion  or  wave  of 
feeling  that  impinges  upon  him.  The  individual  withers 
and  the  crowd  is  more  and  more.  In  particular  we  depend 
chiefly  upon  newspapers  for  our  information  and  guidance, 
and  what  we  get  is  mostly  either  hastily  put  together  and 
sensational  scraps  of  misinformation,  or  deliberately  col¬ 
ored  partisan  reports  and  arguments.  The  need  was  never 
greater  for  a  cool,  dispassionate,  and  critical  or  ‘  ‘  reflective  ’  ’ 
attitude,  on  the  part  of  the  citizenry  than  it  is  to-day.  If, 


INTRODUCTION 


5 


people  in  general,  who  are  the  arbiters  of  social  destiny, 
will  not  or  cannot,  either  think  hard  and  critically  on 
social  problems,  or  follow  leaders  who  do  think  things 
out  honestly,  democracy  will  not  last  long. 

Reason  is  the  power  of  critically  analyzing  data,  put¬ 
ting  them  together  and  drawing  conclusions  from  them. 
There  never  was  so  much  need  of  reasoning  in  regard 
to  the  problems  of  social  life  as  there  is  to-day.  But 
many  tendencies  in  our  social  life  have  conspired  to  make 
reasoning  difficult,  to  belittle  its  social  value,  and  even 
to  deny  to  it  any  large  usefulness.  Irrationalism  is  now 
much  in  evidence  in  art,  letters,  and  criticism,  as  well  as 
in  social  philosophy  and  practical  politics. 

In  plastic  art  there  is  the  striving  for  the  bizarre,  the 
fantastic,  the  unintelligible.  In  painting,  the  cubists  and 
futurists  have  gone  the  pace  towards  a  complete  irrational¬ 
ism  ;  and,  significantly  enough,  they  call  it  a  return  to  the 
primitive.  There  is  the  literature  of  a  disillusioned  hedon¬ 
ism,  a  cynical  realism,  which  depicts  man,  and  especially 
woman,  as  the  mere  creature  of  sexual  desire.  Freudian 
psychoanalysis  is  assumed  to  be  the  sole  key  to  unlock  the 
secrets  of  human  nature  and  to  reveal  man’s  essential  im¬ 
pulses.  Most  of  the  current  literary  criticism  is  without 
any  objective  standards  of  value,  without  any  philosophy 
of  life.  It  is  written  in  a  jaunty  cocksure  vein  by  per¬ 
sons  devoid  of  solid  information  or  proportioned  perspec¬ 
tive  in  regard  to  the  development  of  culture. 

As  more  or  less  blind  reactions  of  the  soul  from  the 
pressure  of  mechanism  and  materialism,  one  notes  the 
rise  of  all  sorts  of  unscientific  mysticisms  and  occultisms, 
from  “new  thought”  and  “spiritualism”  to  Christian 
science  and  theosophy.  These  things  are  expressions  of 
the  soul’s  thirst  for  communion  with  a  spiritual  reality; 
attempts  to  satisfy  man’s  metaphysical  hunger.  For  man, 
as  Hegel  truly  said,  is  the  metaphysical  animal.  He  must 


6 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


commune  with  some  sort  of  higher  reality,  lest  he  perish. 
So  recourse  is  had  to  that  mysterious  hybrid  of  body  and 
soul,  ‘ 1  the  subliminal  self,  ’  ’  which  is  accounted  the  channel 
of  man’s  communion  with  God  and  the  source  of  all  our 
deeper  and  wiser  insights. 

One  notes  a  similar  irrationalism  in  the  revolt  against  the 
existing  social  institutions  which  finds  its  extreme  expres¬ 
sions  in  syndicalism  and  the  Industrial  Workers  of  the 
World,  whose  aim  seems  to  be  to  paralyze  the  present  system 
by  any  and  every  means  in  order  to  give  control  to  the 
“workers.”  How,  after  wrecking  the  present  order,  the 
“workers”  (so-called)  are  to  build  up  a  better  one,  with¬ 
out  expert  managerial  training  or  exceptional  ability,  does 
not  appear.  But  the  flames  of  revolt  are  fanned  by  those 
captains  of  industry  who,  ignoring  the  rise  of  democracy, 
would  stamp  out  labor  organizations  and  deny  to  the  honest 
and  intelligent  workman  any  partnership  in  industry. 
This  is  a  sure  way  to  breed  revolution. 

There  is  a  general  blindness  to  the  need  of  a  public- 
minded  expertness  in  the  making  of  law  and  the  admin¬ 
istering  of  social  affairs.  The  making,  interpretation,  and 
execution  of  law  are  treated  too  much  in  the  spirit  of 
class-interest.  The  fundamental  rights  and  interests  of  the 
whole  community  are  frequently  ignored. 

The  critics  of  the  present  disorder  argue  that  the  real 
rulers  in  industrial  and  political  life  are  the  captains  of 
finance  and  industry.  It  is  true  that  large-scale  production 
and  distribution  put  enormous  power  into  the  hands  of 
the  few  who  control  the  finances  and  policies ;  and  who  may 
be  concerned  primarily  rather  to  get  profits  than  to  give 
service.  What  is  forgotten  is  that  the  power  of  big  business 
is  based  on  its  success  in  catering  to  the  public  tastes.  In 
the  last  analysis  the  dominance  of  the  money  power  to-day 
is  derived  from  its  ability  to  satisfy  the  desires  of  the 
masses  for  food,  clothes,  and  cheap  amusements.  No  escape 


INTRODUCTION 


7 


can  be  found  from  this  vicious  circle,  except  by  an  ex¬ 
tension  of  the  practice  of  thought,  by  more  intelligent 
judgments  of  values  and  choices  of  ends  on  the  part  of  the 
many.  The  only  sure  way  io  improve  our  social  life  is  to 
alter  the  scale  of  human  valuations  or  preferences ,  to  raise 
the  standards  of  taste  in  consumption  for  living  and  the 
enjoyment  of  leisure.  Education  is  the  one  sure  means 
to  this  end.  And  education  is  applied  philosophy ;  it  is 
philosophy  in  action. 

But  in  education  there  is  an  increasing  clamor  that  voca¬ 
tional  training  shall  begin  in  the  grade  schools.  Education 
must  be  made  useful,  that  is,  gainful,  from  the  very  out¬ 
set.  The  age  is  a  commercial  one.  Bread  and  butter  studies 
are  of  paramount  importance.  Moreover,  the  doctrine  that 
individuality  should  be  given  free  play  in  education  is 
pushed  to  the  extreme.  Let  the  pupil  choose  what  he 
likes,  what  interests  him  most.1  We  are  told  that  indi¬ 
viduality  is  sacred  and  must  be  allowed  to  grow,  but  we 
are  given  few  hints  as  to  what  constitutes  true  individuality. 
As  a  consequence,  we  are  now  in  a  state  of  educational 
anarchy.  Engaged  as  we  are  in  training  a  vast  and  hetero¬ 
geneous  democracy,  without  any  well-defined  educational 
philosophy,  without  a  homogeneous  cultural  tradition,  and 
with  the  material  demands  of  the  people  constantly  in¬ 
creasing,  the  cultural  studies,  especially  the  humanities,  are 
threatened  with  extinction.  This  means  increasing  igno¬ 
rance  in  regard  to  the  historical  continuity  of  civilization. 
The  liberally  educated  man,  in  distinction  from  the  special¬ 
ist  and  technician,  seems  to  be  passing  away.  The  “scholar 
and  gentleman”  is  a  vanishing  type.  The  permanent  value 
of  cultural  studies  lies  in  the  fact  that  they  impart  to  each 
succeeding  generation  an  intelligent  consciousness  of  the 
historical  continuity  of  civilization. 

1  Often  he  chooses  the  easiest  studies  or  those  that  come  at  the 
most  convenient  hours. 


8 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


The  chief  causes  of  the  present  cultural  and  spiritual 
chaos  are  three — one  springing  from  a  scientific  fallacy 
and  the  other  two  from  the  confusions  of  thought  incident 
to  great  social  and  industrial  changes. 

The  first  is  the  fallacy  of  attempting  to  interpret  the 
life  of  human  culture  in  terms  of  conceptions  carried  over 
uncritically  from  biology  into  the  study  of  man.  In  the 
animal  world  the  ruling  principle  is  struggle  to  adjust  life 
to  the  given  environment  by  a  process  of  blind  adaptation 
of  spontaneous  variations.  In  this  brute  struggle  for  ex¬ 
istence,  impulse  and  instinct  are  the  ruling  powers.  The 
animal  has  not  the  capacity  for  reflection  or  rational  inter¬ 
pretation  and  organization  of  its  experience  and,  conse¬ 
quently,  cannot  recreate  its  environment.  It  must  simply 
struggle  blindly  to  adjust  itself  to  the  given  situation. 
Generalization,  prevision,  “imaginative  foreshadowings  of 
a  better  world”  are  foreign  to  it.  It  blindly  obeys  the 
vital  impulse.  Does  it  follow  that  the  animal  lives  more 
fully  than  the  thinking  man  ?  To  ask  this  question  is  to 
answer  it.  Biology  cannot  give  us  a  valid  philosophy 
of  human  life.  We  are  not  here  to  live  by  instinct  and  to  be 
content  with  adjustment  to  the  natural  environment. 
Truly  human  behavior  is  more  than  a  biological  response 
to  the  impact  of  the  physical  surroundings.  Our  true 
vocation  is  to  build  up  another  environment  by  the  divine 
power  of  creative  vision.  Our  roots  are  in  the  soil  of 
nature,  but  our  topmost  leaves  should  inhale  the  serene 
and  clear  atmosphere  of  intelligence  and  spirit.  Beware 
of  these  teachers  whose  philosophies  would  degrade  the 
reason  and  thus  reduce  us  to  the  level  of  the  brutes! 
Beware  of  the  impiety  and  ignorance  which  would  destroy 
the  hard  won  and  precious  achievements  of  our  human  cul¬ 
ture  in  the  name  of  progress!  If  we  are  to  build  fairer 
mansions  for  the  spirit  of  man,  these  must  be  erected  on 
the  foundations  which  our  race  has  already  laid,  in  ancient 


INTRODUCTION 


9 


Greece,  and  in  the  whole  development  of  West-European 
and  American  culture.  We  need  no  violent  break  with 
the  past  of  our  own  race. 

The  second  principal  cause  of  the  revolt  against  thought 
and  its  objective  values  is  the  struggle  of  the  democratic 
spirit  against  the  plutocratic  forces  that  have  become  so 
firmly  entrenched  in  the  economic  control  of  society — 
the  warfare  of  King  Demos  and  King  Plutus,  The  mean¬ 
ing  of  the  democratic  right  of  every  individual  to  the 
development  and  enjoyment  of  his  full  humanity  has  been 
somewhat  misinterpreted.  Democracy  properly  implies 
the  effective  enjoyment,  by  all  human  beings,  of  the 
right  to  participate  as  fully  as  they  are  able  in  the  natural 
and  spiritual  heritage  of  the  race.  Democracy  is  the  means 
of  bringing  the  average  man  nearer  to  the  highest  human 
level  attained  by  the  spiritual  leaders  of  the  race.  But 
democracy  is  misconceived  when  it  is  taken  to  mean  that 
all  men,  irrespective  of  their  innate  endowments,  special 
training,  or  personal  efforts,  are  equally  fitted  to  judge 
of  the  relative  values  of  things  in  philosophy,  science,  art, 
and  letters,  or  even  in  social  polity  and  law.  Shall  we 
submit  our  standards  of  aesthetic,  scientific,  educational, 
and  philosophical  values  to  a  plebiscite?  Shall  we  take 
a  popular  vote  on  Darwinism,  the  Kantian  philosophy,  or 
the  Celtic  movement  in  literature  ? 2  Is  the  voice  of  the 
people  the  voice  of  reason  no  matter  wThat  subject  it  may 
elect  to  utter  itself  on? 

Equality  of  opportunity  is  a  sound  social  ideal.  It  means 
that  there  should  be  the  fullest  possible  equalization  of 
opportunity  for  the  development  of  the  human  life  in  all. 
But,  taking  it  strictly,  absolute  equality  is  impossible  in 
any  form  of  social  organization.  For  realized  opportunity 

2  In  this  year  of  grace,  1922,  the  Kentucky  State  Legislature 
came  within  one  vote  of  prohibiting  the  teaching  of  Evolution  in 
State-supported  institutions! 


10 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


is  a  resultant  of  two  variable  components,  which  cannot 
be  isolated — the  social  situation  in  which  an  individual 
finds  himself  and  his  reaction  to  the  situation.  The  former 
component  can  never  be  given  such  a  fixed  and  unvarying 
value  that  the  latter  will  not  introduce  the  element  of  in¬ 
equality.  Nor  is  it  desirable  that  there  should  be  complete 
equality.  The  greatest  danger  which  besets  democracy  is  a 
low  mediocrity  of  taste  and  judgment,  an  indifference  to 
refinement  of  life,  an  unthinking  ignorance  of  what  has 
been  already  achieved.  The  hardest  problem  of  a  demo¬ 
cratic  culture  is,  while  extending  to  all  the  opportunity 
to  participate  freely  in  the  finer  things  of  life,  to  conserve 
and  improve  the  highest  values  which  have  been  wrought 
out  in  the  race’s  cultural  evolution.  These  values  are 
always  the  creations  of  the  relatively  few  who  are  highly 
dowered  with  the  creative  imagination. 

The  third  cause  of  the  confusion  and  lowering  of  the 
cultural  values  of  civilization  is  the  increasing  rule  of  me¬ 
chanical  processes.  Quantity  production  is  cheapest  and 
most  profitable.  Thus,  in  every  department  of  life,  from 
food  and  clothes  to  education,  literature,  and  the  theatre, 
what  is  happening  now  is  the  crowding  to  the  wall  of  the 
thoroughly  and  artistically  fashioned  product,  into  which 
the  maker  has  put  his  individuality,  in  favor  of  the  cheap, 
machine-made  product  distributed  by  the  million.  In- 

dividualitv  and  distinction  tend  to  vanish.  For  reflection 
%/ 

and  selective  choice  are  substituted  gregarious  imitation 
and  suggestion.  The  crowd-mind  rules.  Even  our  mental 
life  grows  sheepish.  Many  even  of  our  university  grad¬ 
uates,  from  whom  better  things  might  be  expected,  exhibit 
only  the  crowd-mind.  Imitation  and  suggestion,  class  and 
party  slogans  and  catch-penny  phrases,  rule  the  public 
mind. 

The  cynical  realism,  the  disillusionment  and  pessimism, 
which  pervade  so  much  of  our  current  literature,  especially 


INTRODUCTION 


11 


that  written  by  the  younger  ones,  express  the  protest  of 
hungry  souls,  starving  for  spiritual  nutriment,  against  the 
emptiness,  trivialness  and  lack  of  spiritual 3  unity  and 
purpose  in  our  social  life.  These  thing's  voice  the  nostalgia 
of  the  soul  for  a  finer,  more  significant,  and  more  harmo¬ 
nious  experience.  Our  civilization  is  being  built  on  a 
narrow  specialization  of  productive  functions.  The  great¬ 
est  danger  to  it  is  the  loss  of  a  vital  sense  of  tine  organic 
wholeness ,  the  living  unity,  of  the  spiritual  or  soul-life  in 
the  individual  and  in  the  social  order.  No  man  can  be 
happy  in  so  far  as  he  is  not  at  unity  with  himself.  No  man 
can  be  satisfied  to  live  by  a  disjointed  collection  of  separate 
impulsions.  And  no  man  can  be  at  unity  with  himself, 
no  man  can  achieve  inner  harmony,  if  he  lives  in  a  society 
whose  members  lack  a  common  understanding  and  a  com¬ 
munal  feeling.  Our  civilization  is  in  danger  of  disintegra¬ 
tion  by  the  drifting  apart,  to  the  point  of  complete  mis¬ 
understanding,  of  its  constituent  members.  What  we  need 
most  is  a  living  and  energizing  sense  of  the  mutual  inter¬ 
dependence,  and  common  interests  in  fundamental  spiritual 
or  humane  values,  on  the  part  of  the  various  functional 
bodies  or  “classes”  which  make  up  society.  The  integrity, 
the  organic  wholeness  of  society,  is  at  once  a  condition  and 
result  of  the  integrity  or  spiritual  wholeness  of  its  indi¬ 
vidual  members.  Without  it,  society  will  fly  apart  into 
atoms  and  the  individual  spirit,  too,  will  suffer  distraction. 

We  must  overcome  the  isolation,  the  loneliness,  and  lack 
of  mutual  understanding  which  have  resulted  from  the 
mechanical  overspecialization  of  social  life  which  has 
brought,  at  once,  a  differentiation  and  an  impoverishment 
of  the  individual’s  life.  We  must  achieve  a  more  vital  and 
all-pervading  sense  of  the  human  and  spiritual  unity  of  life 


3  I  use  the  word  “spiritual”  in  a  broad  sense  to  include  all  that 
appertains  to  the  intellectual,  sesthetic,  and  moral  health  of  the 
human  soul. 


12 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


in  the  individual  and  the  .group.  We  need  not  despair  of 
civilization.  If  there  be  any  truth  in  history,  civilization 
is  most  often  in  transition.  The  epochs  of  unified  and  stable 
culture  are  rare  and  brief.  They  are  no  sooner  achieved 
than  they  begin  to  disintegrate.  Glorious  and  short-lived 
was  the  blooming  of  Greek  culture.  Noble  and  transient 
was  the  Christian  classical  culture  of  the  thirteenth  cen¬ 
tury.  The  goddess  of  reason  of  the  eighteenth  century  was 
soon  dethroned.  At  the  turn  of  the  present  century,  great 
was  our  satisfaction  and  our  faith  in  a  providential  evolu¬ 
tion,  carried  on  by  applied  science  and  machinery.  Nothing 
could  stay  the  inevitable  march  of  progress.  To-day  we  are 
learning  anew  that  men  cannot  hold  and  use  what  goods  they 
have,  much  less  gain  new  goods,  without  unceasing  indi¬ 
vidual  effort.  Belief  in  progress  had  become  a  callow 
superstition.  Social  progress,  as  an  ideal,  is  a  dangerous 
and  empty  illusion,  unless  it  mean  the  growth  of  individuals 
in  intelligence,  self-mastery,  self-determination,  and  fuller 
and  more  harmonious  action  and  experience. 

The  crumbling  of  the  sentimental  and  silly  belief  in  the 
speedy  perfection  of  human  society  is  a  salutary  event,  if 
it  reminds  us,  however  harshly,  that  to  face  the  facts  and 
meet  the  actual  issues  squarely  is  the  only  way  in  which 
human  beings  become  strong  and  mature  individuals. 
What  civilization  needs  to  pilot  it  through  its  present 
stormy  and  rock-infested  wTaters,  is  more  men  and  women 
whose  dynamic  and  creative  energies  are  illumined  and 
guided  by  a  liberal  or  humane  insight  into  the  problems 
and  duties  of  the  time. 

Democracy,  as  an  ideal  of  human  progress  towards  per¬ 
fection,  as  well  as  a  form  of  political  government,  has 
probably  come  to  stay  for  some  time.  But  democracy  can¬ 
not  conserve  what  the  race  has  already  achieved,  and 
progress  towards  the  wider  participation  of  men  and  women 
in  the  life  of  culture,  it  cannot  furnish  a  favorable  soil  for 


INTRODUCTION 


13 


the  nurture  of  the  creative  spirit,  unless  it  be  guided  and 
led  by  the  intellectual  and  spiritual  elite,  recruited  from 
men  and  women  of  exceptionally  high  native  endowment, 
trained  to  be  exponents  of  the  reflective  life,  animated  by 
the  motive  of  service  and  dedicated  to  the  creative  voca¬ 
tion  of  conserving  and  adding  to  the  spiritual  wealth  of 
civilization. 

It  is  to  the  institutions  for  liberal  education,  which,  in 
its  essence,  is  identical  with  philosophy,  that  we  must  look 
chiefly  for  the  conservation  and  enhancement  of  the  cul¬ 
ture-values  of  civilization.  We  need,  more  than  ever  be¬ 
fore,  centers  where  the  contemplative  life  is  nurtured, 
where  young  men  and  young  women  can  gain  an  intelligent 
appreciation  of  the  history  of  culture  and  of  the  chief 
part  which  the  creative  imagination  has  played  in  the  uplift 
of  the  race ;  where  by  a  free  and  earnest  contemplation  of 
the  problems  of  humanity  and  nature,  undisturbed  by  the 
clamor  for  action  and  quick  returns,  they  may  win  the 
power  of  evaluating  the  current  shibboleths  in  the  light 
of  objective  standards. 

Our  nation  urgently  needs  exemplars  of  the  contempla¬ 
tive  life — needs  witnesses  to  the  surpassing  excellence  of 
ideas — needs  constructive  thinkers  to  challenge  and  ex¬ 
amine  the  popular  nostrums  in  social  polity,  literature, 
education,  and  religion.  It  needs  men  and  women  to  show 
forth  in  their  lives  the  beauty,  power  and  enduring  quality 
of  devotion  to  the  principles  of  order,  coherence,  and  har¬ 
mony.  Not  mere  existence  but  the  rational  life,  not  mere 
action  but  action  based  on  the  contemplation  of  worthful 
ends — in  short  to  live  and  work  under  the  guidance  of  a 
rational  interpretation  of  the  meanings  and  values  of  the 
spiritual  order — such  is  the  vocation  of  the  thinker  and 
scholar.  For  the  true  thinker  is  identical  with  the  phi¬ 
losopher.  He  is  one  equipped  with  a  vital  insight  into  the 
essential  achievements  of  man’s  cultural  life,  capable  of 


14 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


open-minded  and  penetrating  judgment  in  applying  this 
insight  to  the  problems  of  the  present,  and  having  a 
courageous  and  loving  spirit  dedicated  to  the  service  of  the 
best. 

There  is  no  type  of  individuality  which  our  democracy 
needs  more  than  the  exponent  and  example  of  the  philo¬ 
sophic  life.  He  is  one  who  thinks  constantly  upon  the 
values  to  be  attained  by  action  before  he  acts,  one  who  per¬ 
sistently  asks  himself  what  is  worth  while,  one  who  brings 
to  bear  a  power  of  balanced  judgment,  that  has  been  nour¬ 
ished  by  an  appreciative  knowledge  of  the  best  that  has 
been  thought  and  done,  upon  the  problems,  beliefs,  and  pro¬ 
posals  of  the  present.  The  devotee  of  the  philosophic  life 
sees  that  much  of  the  activity  of  the  so-called  practical  man 
is  but  vanity,  since  much  of  what  he  strives  for  with  might 
and  main  is  worthless  when  attained.  The  truly  practi¬ 
cal  man  is  he  who  strives  for  what  is  worth  while  in  the 
long  run.  And  this  is  a  clear-sighted  individuality,  in¬ 
formed  and  inspired  by  an  intelligent  appreciation  of  the 
crowning  achievements  of  the  spirit  in  man,  ennobled  by 
sympathy  with  the  race’s  moral  heroes,  refined  through 
the  joy  of  companionship  with  the  truly  beautiful  products 
of  the  race’s  creative  imagination,  mastering  and  possess¬ 
ing  as  its  own  instrument  the  methods  of  science,  working 
in  sympathy  with  our  common  humanity  for  the  uplift  of 
the  race,  and  calmed  and  steadied  by  faith  in  a  Supreme 
Spiritual  Order.  Such  a  life  can  preserve  its  poise  amidst 
the  distractions  and  follies  of  the  present  and  contribute 
something  to  the  progress  of  individuals  in  reason,  justice, 
love,  and  towards  perfection. 

No  notion  could  be  more  erroneous  than  that  which  re¬ 
gards  thought  as  separate  from  life  and  individuality. 
Thinking:  g:oes  on  onlv  in  individual  minds.  It  is  the  most 
intense  sort  of  living.  The  individual  who  thinks  most 
persistently  is  the  one  who  has  the  most  individuality. 


INTRODUCTION 


15 


And  Philosophy  is  simply  the  most  penetrating,  compre¬ 
hensive,  and  consistent  thinking.  It  is  thinking  upon  the 
basic  concerns  of  living — upon  the  meanings  and  values 
of  life  and  its  place  in  the  universe.  As  Novalis  said,  “To 
philosophize  is  to  dephlegmatize  one ’s  self ;  to  philosophize 
is  to  vitalize  one’s  self.”  As  Aristotle  put  it,  man  is  dis¬ 
tinguished  from  all  other  animals  by  his  capacity  for 
thinking.  The  more  he  thinks  the  more  human  he  is. 

Therefore,  every  thinking  individual  must  have  a  phi¬ 
losophy  of  some  sort.  He  cannot  take  his  philosophy  at 
second  hand  from  his  fellows  or  tradition.  For  philosophy 
is  not  a  garment  to  be  put  on,  and  off.  It  is  a  life.  Thus, 
while  the  average  intelligent  person,  or  even  the  person 
of  superior  intelligence,  cannot  expect  to  be  highly  original 
in  the  sense  of  making  a  brand-new  philosophy,  he  must 
be  original  in  the  sense  of  making  philosophy  his  own  living 
possession,  of  working  it  into  the  very  marrow  of  his  spirit¬ 
ual  being.  Otherwise  it  will  be  a  meaningless  encumbrance 
to  him.  Only  he  who  lives  the  life  of  persistent  thinking 
develops  a  philosophy.  For,  while  it  deals  with  the  deepest 
and  broadest  interests  of  man,  a  philosophy  is  a  man’s 
own  life-attitude.  Therefore,  it  is  the  most  intimate  and 
personal  quality  of  an  individual  life. 

To  argue  in  behalf  of  the  value  of  philosophy  to-day  is 
simply  to  argue  that  the  most  thoughtful  life  is  the  best 
life.  This  position  is  by  no  means  generally  accepted. 
In  our  world  at  large,  and  even  in  our  colleges,  persistent 
thoughtfulness  is  more  honored  in  the  breach  than  in  the 
observance.  The  major  tendencies  of  our  restless,  nervous, 
motion-loving,  machine-serving,  sensation-mongering  civ¬ 
ilization  seem  inimical  to  that  repose,  detachment,  and 
concentration  of  spirit,  without  which  genuine  reflection 
cannot  go  on.  One  must  have  the  firmness  of  mind  and 
resolution  of  purpose  to  separate  himself  from  the  clam¬ 
orous  but  empty  trivialities  of  the  moment,  in  order  to 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


16 

* 

philosophize.  In  so  doing  he  will  learn  to  know  himself, 
his  fellow  men,  and  the  real  world;  and  will  become  more 
of  a  real  individual. 

The  greatest  representatives  of  the  reflective  life  in  his¬ 
tory  have  never  claimed  that  thought  was  either  the  whole 
of  life  or  a  sufficient  substitute  for  action  and  reality. 
The  Greeks  are  still  our  exemplars  here.  Socrates,  Plato, 
and  Aristotle  were  no  mere  intellectualists.  They  held  it 
to  be  the  function  of  thought  to  illumine  and  organize 
the  otherwise  dumb  and  chaotic  facts  of  sense-experience 
and  thus  to  harmonize  and  direct  impulse  and  emotion, 
and  to  interpret  life  in  terms  of  order,  measure,  and  propor¬ 
tion  ;  in  short,  to  transform  human  life  into  a  well-ordered 
whole,  a  harmonious  and  balanced  integrity  in  feeling, 
insight,  and  action.  Sanity,  proportion,  moderation,  har¬ 
mony,  attained  through  rational  reflection — such  is  the 
Greek  ideal.  Such  is  the  Christian  conception  in  St.  John, 
and  Origen. 

In  this  matter  the  greatest  of  the  moderns — such  men  as 
Dante,  Leonardo  da  Vinci,  Michelangelo,  Spinoza,  Leib¬ 
nitz,  Kant,  Goethe,  Hegel,  Locke,  and  Bishop  Butler,  to 
name  only  a  few,  are  at  one  with  the  greatest  of  the 
ancients. 

Reason  or  thought  is  the  organizing  power  of  the  re¬ 
flective  life.  Primitive  impulse  and  emotion  are,  by  them¬ 
selves,  chaotic  and  disintegrating.  It  is  the  function  of 
thought  to  universalize  the  raw  impulses  of  life,  to  estab¬ 
lish  systematic  connections  and  objective  standards  of 
value  in  science,  the  social  order,  and  the  individual  life. 
Reason  and  creative  imagination  are  but  two  names  for 
the  same  great  function,  twin  aspects  of  the  constructive 
power  of  thought.  The  philosopher,  the  scientist,  and  the 
poet  see  and  depict,  in  differing  fashion  because  of  the 
differences  in  the  materials  they  work  in  and  the  ends 
they  seek,  the  bonds  of  unity  that  hold  the  universe  to- 


INTRODUCTION 


17 


gether.  The  same  vision  of  order  and  harmony  amidst 
diversity  guides  a  Sophocles,  a  Shakespeare,  or  a  Goethe 
in  his  treatment  of  human  life  that  guides  a  Newton, 
a  Helmholtz,  or  a  Darwin  in  his  treatment  of  physical 
and  biological  facts ;  a  Plato,  a  Spinoza,  or  a  Hegel  in  his 
quest  for  a  reflective  unifying  insight  into  reality  as  a 
whole;  and  an  Isaiah,  a  St.  Paul,  or  a  St.  John,  in  his 
spiritual  vision  of  the  relation  of  the  human  soul  and  the 
universe  to  the  supreme  source  and  ground  of  the  spiritual 
life. 

Nor  is  there  anything  irrational  in  genuine  freedom  and 
individuality.  The  very  principle  or  standard  of  thought 
in  the  quest  for  truth  is  the  standard  of  true  individuality 
and  freedom.  To  be  a  genuine  individual  is  not  to  be  a 
freak  or  oddity.  It  is  to  be  a  harmonious  unity  of  life 
and  reflective  thought.  Here,  as  elsewhere,  the  true  is 
the  harmonious  whole.  The  integrity  of  a  coherent  charac¬ 
ter,  with  an  organized  system  of  purposes  illuminated  and 
guided  by  reflection,  is  the  quality  that  makes  a  genuine 
individual.  The  thoughtful  life  is  the  coherent  and  har¬ 
monious  life,  in  contrast  with  the  random  and  disjointed 
life  of  blind  feeling  and  impulse.  The  same  standard  of 
harmony  or  coherence  is  the  standard  of  truth.  The  true 
is  the  whole.  Self-consistency,  harmony,  organization  into 
a  coherent  system — these  are  alike  notes  not  only  of  the 
most  true  in  science,  but,  as  well,  of  the  highest  type  of 
social  order  and  individual  life.  The  mainspring  of  re¬ 
ligion  and  philosophy  is  the  quest  for  a  harmonious  life, 
individual  and  social,  and  for  a  coherent  insight  into  the 
meaning  of  life  and  the  nature  of  things.  Reality  is  more 
than  thought.  But  the  very  progress  of  science  and  culture, 
brought  about  by  the  unceasing  effort  of  reflection,  is  a 
witness  to  the  truth  that  the  same  principle  of  harmony, 
which  animates  the  human  reason  is  embodied  on  the  grand 
scale  in  the  order  of  nature  itself.  The  world  is  mind 


18 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


writ  large.  Mind  is  the  world  concentrating  itself  in  cen¬ 
ters  of  reflective  consciousness  and  thereby  winning  new 
values.  Harmony,  organization,  life  in  a  well-ordered 
whole — such  are  the  genuine  ideals  of  religion  and  phi¬ 
losophy. 

The  same  principles  are  exemplified  in  the  whole  history 
of  human  culture.  The  social  structures  of  human  life,  the 
family,  the  community,  the  state,  and  the  church,  have 
their  roots  indeed  in  natural  instinct  and  impulse — in  the 
sexual  instinct,  parental  feeling,  gregariousness  and  sym¬ 
pathy,  self-preservation  and  self-defence,  the  feeling  of 
dependence  on  higher  and  mysterious  powers.  But  the 
life  of  culture,  as  distinguished  from  savagery,  has  con¬ 
sisted  in  the  emergence  of  thought  as  orderer  and  ruler  of 
these  primitive  instincts.  Stability  and  coherence  in 
social  structures  and  in  standards  of  conduct  are  indispen¬ 
sable  to  the  maintenance  and  further  development  of  a 
high  civilization.  Life  according  to  nature  is  for  a  man 
a  chimera.  The  Stoic  philosopher,  the  original  preacher 
of  life  according  to  nature,  meant  by  it  life  in  harmony 
with  reason.  Man  is,  in  part,  a  child  of  nature,  but  he  is 
much  more.  The  truly  human  part  of  him  is  the  rational 
and  spiritual  power  which  has  created  morality,  social 
order,  science,  art,  and  religion.  Man’s  true  vocation  is 
not  to  adjust  himself  to  his  natural  environment  by  in¬ 
stinct  ;  but  to  create  and  maintain  a  cultural  and  spiritual 
environment.  Human  civilization  consists  in  this  social 
and  spiritual  atmosphere  in  which  the  individual  can  grow 
to  the  stature  of  rational  manhood.  It  is  man’s  vocation 
to  fashion  out  of  the  materials  supplied  by  nature,  this 
objective  rational  order  of  social,  moral,  and  spiritual 
institutions,  through  which  alone  he  can  attain  and  exer¬ 
cise  true  freedom  and  be  a  rational  personality. 

Freedom  is  not  caprice  or  license.  It  does  not  consist  in 
the  rule  of  instinct,  but  in  the  rule  of  reason.  Freedom  is 


INTRODUCTION 


19 


rational  self-determination  in  the  light  of  an  ideal  whole. 
All  that  distinguishes  cultivated  man  from  the  brute  is  the 
result  of  the  rational  constructive  activity,  which  gives  him 
control  over  nature  and  control  over  himself ;  which  teaches 
him  not  merely  of  the  dust  from  which  he  is  sprung,  but 
more  especially  of  the  spiritual  glory  unto  which  he  may 
attain ;  which  shapes,  by  its  creative  power,  ideal  values 
and  bodies  these  forth  in  institutions — in  law  and  polity, 
in  objective  moral  and  intellectual  standards ;  finally,  in 
the  vision  of  a  Supreme  Rational  Spirit,  the  source  and 
sustainer  of  man’s  own  spiritual  life,  the  conserver  of  his 
most  cherished  values.  The  human  life  begins  in  “the 
moment  of  contemplative  insight  when,  rising  above  the 
animal  life,  we  become  conscious  of  the  greater  ends  that 
redeem  man  from  the  life  of  the  brutes.”  (Bertrand  Rus¬ 
sell). 

The  true  philosopher  cannot  make  common  cause  with 
either  the  social  reactionary  or  the  social  radical.  His  atti¬ 
tude  towards  all  social  problems  is  that  of  the  genuine 
liberal.  His  usual  counsel  is  that  we  make  haste  slowly. 
On  the  one  hand,  he  recognizes  clearly  the  great  amount 
of  thoughtful  endeavor  that  has  gone  into  the  fashion¬ 
ing  and  maintenance  of  our  historic  social  institutions — 
family,  civic  institutions,  industrial  and  economic  order, 
law,  the  state,  and  the  church.  He  sees  that  the  continu¬ 
ance  of  social  order  and  the  growth  of  culture  depends  on 
the  maintenance  of  these  institutions.  Without  them  man 
reverts  to  anarchic  savagery.  The  presumption  is  in  favor 
of  any  human  institution  that  has  long  endured.  The  phi¬ 
losopher  will  be  slow  to  advocate  its  radical  alteration,  and 
will  usually  oppose  its  abolition.  On  the  other  hand,  in 
view  of  changing  conditions,  he  will  recognize  the  need  of 
criticism  and  reconstruction  in  established  institutions.  As 
against  blind  revolt  and  blind  reaction,  he  is  the  advocate 
of  an  experimental,  gradual,  and  thought-directed  im- 


20 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


provement  of  human  institutions,  so  that  these  may  the 
better  serve  the  development  and  enjoyment  of  human  per¬ 
sonality.  For  the  philosopher  measures  and  weighs  all 
human  institutions,  customs,  beliefs,  and  activities  in  terms 
of  their  contributions  to  human  spiritual  values. 

There  can  be  no  intelligent  and  fruitful  individual  self- 
direction  or  social  control  without  a  clear-sighted  and  com¬ 
prehensive  doctrine  of  human  values.  The  individual  can¬ 
not  order  his  own  life  aright,  or  participate  usefully  in 
the  ordering  of  social  effort,  unless  he  have  a  well-thought- 
out  scheme  of  values,  interests,  and  ends.  He  must  have  a 
vision  of  the  meaning  of  life  as  a  whole,  and  of  its  place 
in  the  total  order  of  reality.  He  must  be  able  to  relate 
the  interests,  the  choices  of  values,  the  purposes,  of  his  own 
life,  with  those  of  his  fellow  man.  He  must,  furthermore, 
have  some  intelligent  conviction  as  to  the  place  of  human 
values,  human  purposes,  in  the  total  scheme  of  things.  This 
is  what  is  meant  when  one  says  that  philosophy  seeks  to 
comprehend  the  fundamental  values  of  life  as  a  whole ; 
that  it  seeks  a  total  and  consistent  view  of  life  and  its 
place  in  reality.  Our  partial  and  ephemeral  acts  and  pur¬ 
poses  need  to  be  knitted  up  with  the  whole  of  reality.  We 
need  to  get  beyond  a  life  of  fragmentary  and  disjointed 
acts.  We  need  to  escape  from  living  by  this  impulse  and 
that  habit,  from  a  one-sided  and  maimed  activity  and  exist¬ 
ence,  into  a  life  in  the  open  and  full  universes  of  human 
culture  and  physical  nature.  The  personal  quest  for  a 
rich  and  consistent  doctrine  of  human  values  and  purposes 
and  for  an  understanding  of  the  meaning  of  human  life 
as  a  whole  is  the  essence  of  philosophizing.  This  is  what 
is  meant  when  it  is  said  that  philosophy  enables  us  to 
distinguish  between  the  trivial  and  the  essential,  the  pass¬ 
ing  and  the  permament,  the  show  of  life  and  its  sub¬ 
stance. 

What  Matthew  Arnold  said  of  poetry  is  true  only  of 


INTRODUCTION 


21 


philosophy,  whether  it  be  expressed  through  the  medium 
of  prose  or  poetry.  Philosophy  is  the  criticism  of  life ; 
it  is  the  application  of  ideas  to  life.  It  is  the  guide  to 
civilization.  For  the  philosophical  thinker  evaluates  and 
orders  in  their  places,  both  the  ineradicable  natural  im¬ 
pulses  of  man  and  the  changing  customs  which  are  the 
frameworks  of  his  civilizations,  in  the  light  of  the  most 
penetrating,  comprehensive,  and  consistent  conception  of 
human  life  and  its  values  that  can  be  formed  by  thought. 
Philosophy  is  not  the  system  of  any  man  or  school.  It 
is  the  individual  mind  animated  by  the  spirit  of  open- 
minded  and  persistent  endeavor  to  discover  the  whole 
truth  in  regard  to  life  and  reality.  It  is  man  thinking 
out  the  most  ultimate,  perplexing,  and  interesting  prob¬ 
lems  of  existence.  The  primary  aim  of  the  following  work 
is  to  show  how  philosophy  has  served,  serves  now,  and  must 
continue  to  serve,  as  the  interpreter  of  the  essential  spirit 
of  human  culture. 


ill" 


PART  I 

THE  CHIEF  PROBLEMS  AND  STANDPOINTS 
OF  GREEK  AND  MEDIEVAL  PHILOSOPHY 


CHAPTER  I 


PHILOSOPHY,  ITS  MEANING  AND  SCOPE 

I.  Definition  of  Philosophy 

The  word  “philosophy ”  is  derived  from  the  Greek 
words  philein,  meaning  “to  love,”  and  sophia,  meaning 
“wisdom.”  Hence  the  true  philosopher  is  a  lover  of  wis¬ 
dom.  The  term  “wisdom”  means  knowledge  and  insight 
directed  towards  the  attainment  of  the  best  life  possible 
and  to  the  endurance  of  immedicable  ills.  In  popular 
speech,  to  be  philosophically  minded  is  to  endeavor,  by 
the  exercise  of  reason,  to  make  the  best  of  time  and  cir¬ 
cumstance  ;  it  is  to  use  one ’s  intellect  to  achieve  solid 
satisfactions  and  to  bow  gracefully  to  the  inevitable.  The 
philosophical  life  is  a  life  in  which  practice  is  guided  by 
theory,  in  contrast  with  the  life  guided  merely  by  custom 
and  imitation  and  with  the  life  ruled  by  impulse.  In 
order  that  one  may  guide  one’s  life  by  reason,  one  must 
think  out  some  sort  of  view  of  the  meaning  of  the  world 
and  the  place  of  human  life  in  the  world. 

The  philosopher  strives,  as  Plato  so  finely  puts  it,  to 
attain  a  synoptic  vision  of  things,  to  see  things  as  a 
whole  or  together,  that  is,  to  see  all  the  main  features 
of  experience,  life,  and  conduct  in  their  interrelationships. 
The  philosopher  strives  to  be  “the  spectator  of  all  time 
and  existence.”  This  does  not  mean  that  the  philosopher 
must  compass  in  minute  detail  all  knowledge  and  all  experi¬ 
ence.  It  means  rather  that,  in  trying  to  reach  a  unified  and 

consistent  view  of  things,  the  philosopher  will  not  neglect 

25 


26 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


to  consider  the  general  significance  of  any  of  the  main  fields 
of  human  experience,  knowledge,  or  conduct. 

A  complete  philosophy  includes  a  world-view ,  or  rea¬ 
soned  conception  of  the  whole  cosmos,  and  a  life-view,  or 
doctrine  of  the  values,  meanings,  and  purposes  of  human 
life.  Philosophy,  like  science,  consists  of  theories  or  in¬ 
sights  arrived  at  as  a  result  of  systematic  reflection  or 
reasoning  in  regard  to  the  data  of  experience.  It  involves, 
therefore,  the  analysis  of  experience  and  the  synthesis  of 
conception.  Philosophy  seeks  a  totality  and  harmony  of 
reasoned  insight  into  the  nature  and  meaning  of  all  the 
principal  aspects  of  reality. 

Plato  distinguished  between  Ignorance,  Right  Opinion, 
and  Knowledge  or  Wisdom.  Ignorance  is  not  to  know, 
nor  to  know  why  you  do  not  know.  Right  opinion  is  a 
belief  which  corresponds  to  the  facts  but  is  devoid  of 
reasoned  insight  into  its  own  foundations.  Knowledge 
is  belief  with  reasons.  If  one  knows  wherein  his  own 
ignorance  lies  or  the  limitations  of  the  possibilities  of  the 
subject,  he  may  be  rightly  said  to  possess  knowledge  of 
the  subject. 

II.  Relation  of  Philosophy  to  Science 

Philosophy  is  more  fundamental  and  comprehensive  than 
science ;  otherwise  thev  are  identical  in  their  aims.  Philo- 
sophical  knowledge  has  these  three  characteristics : 

1.  It  is  fundamental  knowledge. 

2.  It  is  most  comprehensive  or  generalized  knowledge. 

3.  It  is  most  unified  and  consistent  knowledge. 

The  idea  that  philosophical  knowledge  is  the  most 
fundamental  and  comprehensive  knowledge  is  embodied 
in  such  expressions  as  “the  philosophy  of  life,”  “the 
philosophy  of  art,  ”  “  the  philosophy  of  politics,  ’  ’  et  cetera. 


•  PHILOSOPHY,  ITS  MEANING  AND  SCOPE  27 

The  “philosophy”  of  anything  is  the  theory  of  its  first 
and  most  fundamental  principles. 

The  aim  of  philosophy  is  to  discover  the  full  meanings 
and  relations  of  Truth,  Beauty,  and  Goodness,  and  to 
determine  their  places  in  the  universe  of  reality.  Philos¬ 
ophy  is  an  attempt  to  interpret  reflectively  human  life  in 
all  its  relations.  The  philosopher  aims  to  “see  life  steadily 
and  to  see  it  whole.”  Plato  says  “the  unexamined  life 
is  not  a  truly  human  life.”  Philosophy  is  rational  reflec¬ 
tion  upon  experience,  belief,  and  conduct.  It  is  closely 
related  to  science,  conduct,  and  religion. 

Science  is  a  careful  scrutiny  of  the  grounds  of  our  com¬ 
mon  sense  beliefs.  It  analyzes  and  describes  our  common 
experiences.  It  is  organized  common  sense.  The  special 
sciences  are  the  children  of  philosophy,  and  can  never 
replace  philosophy.  All  the  sciences  give  rise  to  philo¬ 
sophical  problems  and  theories.  Among  the  Greeks,  phi¬ 
losophy  included  all  science.  In  fact,  Aristotle  was  the 
first  to  map  out  the  field  of  knowledge  into  distinct  sciences. 
In  the  course  of  intellectual  historv  the  various  sciences 
have  gradually  been  split  off  from  philosophy  in  the  fol¬ 
lowing  order :  mathematics,  astronomy,  physics,  chemistry, 
biology,  psychology,  and  sociology.  But  this  separation  of 
the  special  sciences  from  philosophy  does  not  mean  that, 
with  their  complete  differentiation,  there  are  no  longer  any 
philosophical  problems  involved  in  the  work  of  the  special 
sciences.  Indeed,  there  are  three  sets  of  problems  of  a 
philosophical  character  which  have  been  rendered  more 
acute  by  the  development  of  modern  science.  These  are  as 
follows : 

1.  All  sciences  make  assumptions.  Philosophy  examines 
these  assumptions. 

2.  The  mutual  adjustment  of  the  principles  of  the  several 
sciences  into  a  unified  and  coherent  view  of  things  is  a 
philosophical  task. 


28 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


3.  The  adjustment  of  the  principles  of  science  and  the 
principles  and  beliefs  which  underlie  the  practical  conduct 
of  life  is  a  task  of  philosophy. 

The  data  of  the  sciences  are  really  sense-data  or  perceived 
facts.  In  reducing  these  data  to  orderly  and  compact  bodies 
of  conceptual  description  and  explanation,  science  makes 
assumptions.  These  basic  assumptions  of  the  sciences, 
philosophy  must  critically  examine ;  for  example,  the  uni¬ 
formity  of  the  causal  order — like  causes  produce  like  effects. 
Moreover,  it  is  generally  assumed  in  the  practical  affairs  of 
the  common  social  life  that  each  individual  is  responsible 
for  his  own  acts.  But  if  we  are  machines,  as  the  physiolo¬ 
gist  might  assume,  this  is  not  true.  Philosophy  is  thus  a 
clearing  house  for  the  sciences,  adjusting  their  several  con¬ 
clusions  to  one  another  and  to  practical  life. 

In  so  far  as  scientists,  working  in  special  fields,  examine 
their  own  working  assumptions,  widest  generalizations  or 
“laws  of  nature,”  and  the  relations  between  the  laws  of 
their  special  scientific  fields  and  other  fields,  they  become 
philosophers.  It  is  possible  to  carry  on  investigations  in 
physics  without  inquiring  into  the  ultimate  nature  of  mat¬ 
ter  or  energy ;  it  is  possible  to  study  the  phenomena  of 
life  without  raising  the  questions  as  the  ultimate  rela¬ 
tions  of  life,  matter  and  energy;  it  is  possible  to  carry 
on  work  in  any  of  the  special  sciences  without  considering 
the  ultimate  meaning  of  the  connection  of  Cause  and  Effect ; 
but  as  soon  as  one  raises  any  of  these  final  questions,  which 
lie  at  the  roots  of  science,  one  enters  the  field  of  philosophy. 

In  brief,  the  assumptions  and  conclusions  of  the  several 
sciences  call  for  critical  examination  and  coordination,  and 
this  is  a  principal  part  of  the  work  of  philosophy.  For 
example,  what  are  Matter,  Life,  Mind,  Space,  Time,  Caus¬ 
ality,  Purpose  ?  What  are  their  interrelations  ?  Is  the 
living  organism  merely  a  machine,  or,  is  it  something  more  ? 
What  is  the  mind  or  soul,  and  what  are  its  relations  to 


29 


PHILOSOPHY,  ITS  MEANING  AND  SCOPE 

life  and  matter?  What  are  Space  and  Time?  Is  the 
world  really  boundless  in  space  and  endless  in  duration? 
What  are  the  enduring  realities?  Or,  does  nothing  really 
endure?  What  is  the  status  of  purpose  in  the  universe? 
Does  everything  that  happens,  happen  blindly  and  mechani¬ 
cally  ?  Are  our  human  beliefs  in  the  permanent  significance 
of  the  purposes  and  values  achieved  by  the  rational  indi¬ 
vidual  illusions?  What  may  we  hope  for  in  regard  to  the 
realization  and  conservation  of  the  highest  human  values? 
Such  are  the  exceedingly  difficult  and  important  questions 
to  wThich  philosophy  seeks  reasoned  answers. 

Judgment  should  not  be  passed  as  to  the  meaning  of 
human  life  and  its  status  in  the  cosmos  until  all  the  evi¬ 
dence  is  in.  The  one  fundamental  faith  or  postulate  in 
philosophy  is  that  nobody  can  be  too  intelligent.  Great 
evils  have  come  in  the  past  through  lack  of  intelligence. 

III.  The  Relation  of  Philosophy  to  Practical  Life, 
Especially  to  Conduct  and  Religion 

Natural  science  is  impersonal  and  indifferent  to  human 
weal  or  woe.  It  is  not  concerned  with  the  values  of  life ; 
it  is  essentially  nonhuman.  Material  progress  does  not 
necessarily  mean  improvement  in  human  nature. 

In  short,  the  standpoint  of  natural  science  in  regard  to 
the  ethical  and  other  personal  interests  of  human  selves  is 
neutral.  The  business  of  natural  science  is  to  consider 
everything  which  occurs ,  whether  in  the  physical  world  or 
in  human  nature,  as  an  inevitable  event  in  the  endless 
march  of  physical  causation.  Its  fundamental  postulate, 
or  working  principle,  is  that  of  a  ihoroughgoing  mathe¬ 
matical  and  physical  determinism.  But  there  is,  besides 
the  physical  realm,  the  human  realm  of  psychical  inter¬ 
ests,  purposes,  ends ;  in  short,  the  realm  of  human  values. 


30  THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 

Two  chief  kinds  of  human  values  may  be  distinguished, 
namely : 

1.  Instrumental  values,  which  are  of  use  as  means  to 
realize  ends 

2.  Intrinsic  values  realized  within  the  self,  experiences 
valued  in  themselves  or  for  their  own  sakes 

The  good  life  is  the  life  which  contains  great  intrinsic 
or  satisfying  values.  Ethics  deals  with  intrinsic  values  or 
goods  for  selves.  Ethics  is  thus  the  philosophy  of  the  intrin¬ 
sic  or  immediate  values  which  may  be  achieved  and  enjoyed 
through  the  voluntary  acts  of  individuals  as  members  of 
society.  ^Esthetics,  dealing  with  the  beautiful,  is  also  a 
part  of  the  philosophy  of  values.  A  third  form  of  human 
value  is  religious  value.  In  the  religious  relation  or  experi¬ 
ence,  men  enjoy  such  values  as:  peace  of  heart,  harmony 
of  will,  communion  with  God,  Divine  forgiveness,  salvation, 
spiritual  joy,  and  strength.  For  the  religious  man  these 
are  the  highest  and  most  inclusive  values  of  life,  and  the 
best  life  is  one  controlled  by  such  values. 

Religion  claims  to  answer  the  question :  How  do  values 
endure  ?  The  life  that  is  best  is  the  only  one  that  endures, 
on  account  of  its  harmony  with  the  supreme  purpose  of  the 
universe ;  such  is  the  central  tenet  in  religion.  All  religion 
is  faith  in  the  supremacy  in  the  universe,  and  therefore,  the 
permanence,  of  the  best  life,  the  life  having  the  most  worth. 
Religion  is  close  to  conduct  because  it  attempts  to  give  firm 
foundation  for  the  intrinsic  values  of  life. 

The  atheistic  or  materialistic  view  of  the  universe  is  that 
blind  physical  forces  will  finally  overcome  human  existence 
and  effort,  and  engulf  all  human  values.  Philosophy  is 
interested  in  what  nature  is,  but  also  in  what  are  the  values 
of  life,  and  what  is  the  status  of  the  highest  human  life; 
that  is,  philosophy  asks  :  What  is  the  status  of  values  in  the 
real  world  ? 

What  are  the  highest  values  of  life,  is  the  problem  of 


31 


PHILOSOPHY,  ITS  MEANING  AND  SCOPE 

ethics,  an  important  branch  of  philosophy.  Religion  affirms 
dogmatically  that  what  a  society  or  individual  members 
thereof  regard  as  the  highest  values  are  promoted  and  con¬ 
served  by  a  Higher  Power.  Religion  pictures  the  highest 
values  of  life  as  incorporated  in  the  Supreme  Reality  or 
Perfect  Power  who  rules  the  Cosmos. 

IV.  Methods  of  Religion  and  Philosophy 

The  procedure  of  philosophy  is  intellectual,  finding 
reasons  for  our  beliefs,  and  rejecting  beliefs  that  are  incon¬ 
sistent  with  the  facts  or  with  well-grounded  principles. 
Religion  is  not  primarily  intellectual.  It  is  based  chiefly 
upon  tradition  and  feeling.  Hence,  religion  is  one  of  the 
most  conservative  and  unchanging  factors  in  human  life. 
For  the  power  of  Tradition  makes  for  social  conservatism, 
for  the  maintenance,  unchanged,  of  the  social  institutions 
inherited  from  the  past ;  and  Feeling,  or  the  native  and 
emotional  reaction  of  the  individual,  is  the  most  intimately 
personal  and  unvarying  psychical  factor  in  the  self,  since  it 
strikes  its  roots  deep  down  in  the  subsoil  of  man’s  inherited 
and  unconscious  primal  appetites  and  needs,  from  which 
spring  into  conscious  action  all  his  aversions  and  strivings, 
loves  and  hates,  hopes  and  fears,  joys  and  sorrows.  The 
emotional  life  early  takes,  in  childhood  and  youth,  a  set  or 
bent  which  the  individual  can  never  greatly  alter  in  later 
life.  He  may  gloss  it  over  or  deck  it  out  in  new  garb,  but 
he  cannot  uproot  it  or  alter  its  direction.  The  future 
character  of  the  individual  is  probably  fully  determined 
before  he  is  much  past  twenty-one. 

It  may  happen,  especially  in  changing  cultural  condi¬ 
tions,  that  an  individual,  with  pronounced  native  idiosyn¬ 
crasy  and  sensitiveness  to  the  currents  of  the  cultural 
life,  will  revolt  against  the  prevailing  traditional  forms  of 
religion,  because  they  are  not  in  harmony  with  the  ideas 


32 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


and  emotions  of  his  own  soul.  Thus  arise  prophets,  recrea¬ 
tors,  reformers,  innovators,  and  critics  in  the  religious 
sphere.  Thus  an  individual  may,  in  company  with  a  few 
like-minded  persons,  try  to  reform  the  actual  religion  of  his 
social  group ;  or  he  may  reject  it  as  hopeless,  and  either 
join  another  group  or  endeavor  to  form  a  new  group.  Reli- 
gion  is  preeminently  a  group  matter.  It  is  only  in  highly 
sophisticated  societies,  and  even  then  among  the  minority, 
that  an  individualistic  type  of  religious  attitude  appears. 
( Mysticism  is,  we  shall  see,  the  most  individualistic  type  of 
religious  attitude.)  Seldom  does  the  individual  break  away 
from  the  religion  of  the  group.  Even  in  advanced  civiliza¬ 
tions,  the  influence  of  social  traditions  and  group  senti¬ 
ments,  intermingled  in  some  measure  with  individual 
peculiarities  of  ideation  and  emotion,  chiefly  determine  a 
man’s  religious  attitude. 

The  method  of  philosophy  is  sustained  rational  inquiry. 
Philosophy  originates  and  flourishes  in  the  rational  activity 
of  the  individual  mind .  The  group-mind  is  seldom  guided 
by  reason.  Moreover,  the  scope  of  philosophy  is  wider  than 
that  of  religion.  Philosophy  must  determine  not  only  the 
nature  and  meaning  of  religion,  but  also  its  relation  to  the 
principles  of  the  sciences  and  to  other  main  interests  of  life, 
such  as  moral  conduct,  social  order,  art,  and  culture. 

Philosophy  has  three  main  problems : 

1.  The  interpretation  of  nature 

2.  The  interpretation  of  human  values 

3.  The  determination  of  the  place  of  human  values  in 
the  order  of  nature 

Why  the  frequent  conflict  between  religion  and  phi¬ 
losophy?  Religion  is  conservative  and  philosophy  is  not 
conservative,  but  radical,  skeptical,  and  reconstructive. 
Since  religion  is  based  largely  on  social  customs  and  per¬ 
sonal  feeling,  it  is  not  always  very  careful  as  to  whether 


PHILOSOPHY,  ITS  MEANING  AND  SCOPE  33 

there  is  consistency  in  its  beliefs  or  not.  Philosophy  seeks 
consistency  above  all  things  else. 

Does  philosophy  make  assumptions?  No.  But  it  has 
progressively  realized  that  there  is  some  kind  of  intel¬ 
ligibility  in  the  world,  that  the  world  can,  in  part,  be 
understood,  and  that  we  have  experiences  which,  if  prop¬ 
erly  interrogated,  will  yield  answers  to  our  questions. 

Y.  Poetry  and  Philosophy 

The  more  serious  poetry  of  the  race  has  a  philosophi¬ 
cal  structure  of  thought.  It  contains  beliefs  and  concep¬ 
tions  in  regard  to  the  nature  of  man  and  the  universe,  God 
and  the  soul,  fate  and  providence,  suffering,  evil,  and 
destiny.  Great  poetry  always  has,  like  the  higher  reli¬ 
gion,  a  metaphysical  content.  It  deals  with  the  same  august 
issues,  experiences  and  conceptions  as  metaphysics  or  first 
philosophy.  For  example,  the  author  of  Job,  ^Eschylus, 
Sophocles,  Euripides,  Pindar,  Lucretius,  Omar  Khayyam, 
Dante,  Milton,  Shakespeare,  Coleridge,  Wordsworth,  Mat¬ 
thew  Arnold,  Browning,  Tennyson,  Goethe,  Schiller,  Mo- 
liere,  are  philosophical  poets.  Poetry  is  more  concrete,  vivid, 
and  dramatic  in  its  treatment  of  these  high  themes;  it  is 
more  intuitive  in  its  thought  processes  and  expressions  than 
philosophy ;  hence  it  makes  a  more  direct  appeal  to  the 
emotions  than  philosophy.  A  philosophical  poet  is  a  meta¬ 
physician  who  does  not  think  in  a  predominately  concep- 
tional,  ratiocinative  manner.  A  metaphysician  is  a  thinker 
who  does  not  think  in  concrete  pictures,  or,  if  he  does,  is 
unable  to  express  himself  in  rhythm,  color,  and  swift  move¬ 
ment  of  speech  as  does  the  poet,  and,  at  the  same  time,  has 
a  genius  for  analysis  and  ratiocination.  Sometimes,  as  in 
Plato,  a  genius  is  supreme  in  both  orders  of  spiritual  crea¬ 
tiveness,  and  then  we  get  the  absolute  best  in  the  spiritual 


34  THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 

realm,  the  profoundest  thought  wedded  to  the  noblest 
expression 

References 

*  Avey,  Albert  Headings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  I.  (This 

work  is  a  compilation  of  source-readings  in  philosophy  de¬ 
signed  as  a  companion  to  the  present  volume.) 

Calkins,  Mary  Whiton,  Persistent  Problems  of  Philosophy, 
Chapter  I. 

*  Encyclopaedia  Britannica,  11th  edition,  Article  “Philosophy.” 
Fletcher,  Orlin  0.,  Introduction  to  Philosophy,  Chapter  I. 
Fullerton,  George  S.,  Introduction  to  Philosophy,  Chapter  I, 

and  The  World  We  Live  In. 

*  James,  William,  Some  Problems  of  Philosophy,  Chapter  I. 
Jerusalem,  Wilhelm,  Introduction  to  Philosophy,  First  Division. 

*  Kulpe,  Oswald,  Introduction  to  Philosophy,  Chapters  I  and  IV. 

*  Paulsen,  Friedrich,  Introduction  to  Philosophy,  Introduction. 

*  Perry,  Ralph  Barton,  Approach  to  Philosophy,  Chapters 

I-V. 

*  Plato,  Symposium  and  Phcedo. 

*  Royce,  Josiah,  The  Spirit  of  Modern  Philosophy,  Introduc¬ 

tion. 

*  Russell,  Bertrand,  The  Problems  of  Philosophy,  Chapter  XV. 
Sellars,  Roy  Wood,  Essentials  of  Philosophy,  Chapter  I. 
Watson,  John,  Outline  of  Philosophy,  Chapter  I. 


Asterisks  are  prefixed  to  the  references  considered  suitable  for 
beginners. 


CHAPTER  II 


PRIMITIVE  THOUGHT 

I.  The  Primitive  World  View 

Although  prehistoric  man  has  left  no  records  of  his  inner 
life,  the  earliest  traditions  and  literature  throw  light  on 
primitive  views,  and  the  facts  entitle  one  to  assume  that 
savage  belief  and  thought  to-day  are  very  like  primitive 
belief  and  thought.  This  assumption  is  supported  by  the 
study  of  the  earliest  literature  of  civilized  peoples,  of  savage 
lore,  and  of  the  theory  of  evolution. 

We  do  not  know  what  the  cave  man  thought;  but,  since 
he  has  left  some  fine  artistic  records,  it  is  fair  to  conclude 
that  he  had  a  good  deal  of  intelligence,  and  that  he  thought 
as  capably  in  regard  to  the  world  and  himself  as  do  so-called 
savages  and  the  masses  of  unscientific  minds  in  high  civiliza¬ 
tions  to-day.1  There  are  millions  of  people  to-day,  living  in 
high  cultures,  whose  beliefs  are  not  one  whit  in  advance  of 
savage  beliefs,  in  so  far  as  rational  belief  depends  on  the 
individual  thinking  out  for  himself  the  grounds  of  his 
beliefs.  I  see  no  evidence  that  the  rank  and  file  of  humanity 
has  any  greater  innate  capacity  to  think  than  primitive  or 
so-called  savage  peoples.  Wherein  the  masses  in  highly 
civilized  lands  are  in  more  advantageous  position,  is  in 
their  accessibility  to  the  heritage  of  the  race’s  pioneers  in 
thinking.  The  achievements  of  the  pioneers  are  preserved 
in  an  ever  increasing  social  inheritance,  and  facilities  for 

1  On  savage  logic  compare  F.  B.  Jevons,  Introduction  to  the  His¬ 
tory  of  Religion,  pp.  28-35. 


35 


36 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


their  distribution  are  improvable  through  a  wise  policy  of 
education.  How  far  the  average  person  assimilates  and 
makes  his  own  the  processes,  as  well  as  the  results,  of  the 
work  of  the  pioneers,  is  another  question.  Perhaps,  the 
great  majority  of  human  beings  are  born  without  the  pas¬ 
sion  for  understanding.  “Knowledge  comes,  but  wisdom 
lingers.”  Possibly,  this  is  due,  in  part,  to  the  present  con¬ 
ditions  in  the  economic  struggle  for  existence ;  and,  in  part, 
to  inadequate  and  defective  educational  instruments.  But, 
under  the  most  favorable  conditions,  the  thinkers  would 
always  be  in  the  minority.  It  is  doubtful  whether  our 
present  system  of  popular  education  does  not  retard  inde¬ 
pendent  or  self -thinking  as  much  as  it  promotes  it.  All 
genuine  education  is  self-education.  It  will  incite  the 
individual  to  think  for  himself,  by  rethinking  what  the 
race’s  great  thinkers  have  already  thought  for  him,  thus 
enabling  him  to  go  ahead  under  his  own  mental  steam. 

Primitive  man  believed  that  everywhere  in  the  world 
everything  was  alive ;  there  was  a  universally  diffused 
energy.  The  world  was  not  orderly  to  him,  it  was  only 
alive.  Man  had  not  yet  arrived  at  the  distinction  between 
animate  and  inanimate  things.  Moreover,  he  had  no  con¬ 
ception  of  personality.  Wherever  anything  was  done, 
there  was  energy  and  life. 

The  simplest  and  therefore,  probably,  the  earliest  phi¬ 
losophy  of  nature  is  the  belief  in  a  widely  and  indefinitely 
diffused  power  or  influence  (Mana).2  This  power  is  be¬ 
lieved  to  be  operative  wherever  anything  striking  or 
unusual  happens.  It  produces  catastrophes,  diseases,  death ; 
is  present  in  conception  and  birth ;  it  causes  plants  and  ani¬ 
mals  and  human  beings  to  increase  and  multiply ;  it  gives 


2  The  word  Mana ,  which  has  come  into  general  use  as  a  name  for 
this  power  or  influence,  is  the  Melanesian  name.  (See  Bishop  Cod- 
rington,'  The  Melanesians.)  Among  the  North  American  Indians 
voakanda,  orenda,  and  manitou  are  names  for  the  same  notion. 


PRIMITIVE  THOUGHT 


37 


prowess  to  the  great  warrior  and  skill  to  the  mighty  hunter ; 
it  works  in  the  medicine  man,  in  the  good  canoe,  and  the 
deadly  spear.  The  gods  and  the  evil  spirits  wield  it.  It  is 
liable  to  break  out  anywhere,  especially  in  unusual  occur¬ 
rences.  Mana  is  not  evenly  distributed  and  does  not  work 
in  an  orderly  manner,  since  it  is  subject  to  the  control  of 
gods,  heroes,  and  demons,  although  in  its  essence  it  is  dis¬ 
tinct  from  them.  It  is  not  soul  or  spirit  but  power.  There¬ 
fore  it  is  better  to  call  this  early  philosophy  of  nature 
Animatism  or  Pan-Vitalism  rather  than  Animism,  since  the 
latter  term  rather  implies  the  notion  of  a  soul  differing  in 
kind  from  the  body.  (I  follow  here  R.  R.  Marett  in  his 
Threshold  of  Religion  and  other  writings.)  The  doctrine 
of  Mana  or  Animatism  is  the  ancestor  of  our  modern  doc¬ 
trine  of  a  universal  Energy.  It  recognizes  no  distinction 
between  animate  and  inanimate  beings.  A  rarefied  form 
of  the  same  doctrine  is  our  modern  Panpsychism — the  theory 
that  all  activity  is  an  expression  of  Soul  or  Conscious  Life. 
The  early  Greek  hvlozoism  (all  matter  is  alive)  seems  a 
direct  descendant  of  the  Mana  doctrine. 

II.  Primitive  Idea  of  the  Soul 

Primitive  men  do  not  think  of  the  soul  as  immaterial. 
The  soul  has  no  specific  mass  or  weight.  It  is  of  much 
more  tenuous  material  than  the  body.  It  is  an  active  prin¬ 
ciple.  But  it  is  not  different  in  kind  from  the  physical 
objects  with  which  it  is  associated.  It  differs  only  in  de¬ 
gree.  It  is  elusive.  It  can  leave  the  body  and  enter  other 
bodies.  It  hovers  around  after  death ;  so  food  and  drink 
are  given  for  it.  Many  primitive  peoples  do  not  regard 
the  soul  as  being  generated  with  the  body.  The  Australian 
savages,  it  is  said  (according  to  Spencer  and  Gillen,  North¬ 
ern  Tribes  of  Central  Australia) ,  do  not  regard  generation 
and  birth  as  a  result  of  the  sex  relation.  They  think  the 


38 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


child  is  the  result  of  a  preexisting  soul — a  reincarnation. 
Many  consider  the  soul  as  a  manikin,  like  an  image  or  a 
shadow  of  the  body.  Mysterious  powers  are  attributed  to 
a  person ’s  shadow.  Savages  are  often  afraid  to  have  their 
pictures  taken  because  their  souls  might  be  harmed  by  ex¬ 
posure  of  the  photograph.  The  soul  is  sometimes  con¬ 
ceived  as  like  a  bird,  also  as  air,  for  example,  by  the  ancient 
Hebrews  and  Romans.  The  ancient  Egyptians  held  that 
every  person  had  a  Ka,  or  guardian  spirit,  which  enabled 
him  at  death  to  become  a  Ba,  a  bird-man  or  immortal  soul. 
Mr.  Crawley  ( The  Idea  of  the  Sold,  Chapters  IV  and  V) 
holds  that  the  primitive  idea  of  the  soul  is  that  of  a  mental 
duplicate  of  the  living  and  bodily  self.  The  soul  is  a  minia¬ 
ture  of  the  body,  a  little  image  thereof,  and  the  idea  of  it 
is  derived  from  memory-images  of  the  living  person,  espe¬ 
cially  visual  images.  Thus  it  is  a  refined  and  more  elusive 
and  active  body  than  the  external  body.  It  may  be  so 
perfect  a  replica  of  the  latter  that  it  reproduces  in  little 
all  the  malformations  and  mutilations  of  the  external  body. 
It  may  be  small  enough  to  be  held  in  the  hand  or  may 
even  be  no  larger  than  the  image  of  the  body,  seen  in  the 
pupil  of  the  eye.  On  the  other  hand,  it  may  assume  colossal 
proportions.  It  may  be  colored — red,  white,  or  black.  It 
may  be  identified  with  the  blood,  or  breath,  or,  more 
vaguely,  with  life,  or  with  flesh  and  blood  without  bones. 
A  man  may  have  a  plurality  of  souls.  The  Bavili,  an 
African  people,  are  said  to  credit  each  man  with  four 
souls.  The  Laos  people  of  India  credit  him  with  thirty. 
The  soul  is  separable  from  the  body,  leaves  it  at  night, 
and,  especially  in  dreams,  is  more  rapid,  elusive,  and 
evanescent  in  its  movements;  ‘‘a  light,  fluttering,  or  glid¬ 
ing  thing,  quick  to  come  and  quick  to  go,  hard  to  catch 
and  hard  to  detain.”  3  It  is  more  real  and  permanent  than 


3  E.  Crawley,  The  Idea  of  the  Soul,  p.  211.  Mr.  Crawley’s  theory 
of  the  origin  of  the  various  ideas  and  images  of  the  soul  is  the  most 


PRIMITIVE  THOUGHT 


39 


the  body,  because,  says  Mr.  Crawley,  the  memory-image  is 
more  constant  than  the  percept.  Hence,  since  the  naive 
mind  finds  it  hard  to  believe  in  absolute  death  and  since, 
during  the  present  life  the  soul  is  held  to  be  able  to  leave 
the  body  at  will,  primitive  thought  easily  forms  the  belief 
in  the  continued  existence  of  the  soul  after  bodily  death. 
In  sum,  then,  the  primitive  or  early  view,  which  persists 
in  naive  thought  to-day,  even  amongst  highly  civilized  peo¬ 
ples,  is  that  the  soul  is  a  finer,  more  active,  more  enduring, 
more  elusive,  and  more  vital  replica  of  the  bodily  person¬ 
ality  or  self,  and  that  it  continues  to  live  after  the  death 
of  the  bodily  self. 

The  causes  for  making  a  distinction  between,  and  a  sepa¬ 
ration  of,  body  and  soul,  were  reflections  upon  the  persist¬ 
ence  and  recurrence  of  memory-images  of  other  selves  both 
in  waking  hours  and  during  sleep,  in  dreams  and  visions 
of  terror  and  delight,  the  mysteriousness  of  death,  disease, 
and  misfortune,  and  the  feeling  of  being  environed  by 
mysterious  forces  potent  for  good  and  evil. 

The  third  conception  is  that  of  spirits.  The  great  spir¬ 
its  were  believed  to  be  free  from  the  hampering  influence 
of  ordinary  physical  events.  A  striking  phenomenon  will 
cause  the  supposition  of  spirits.  Some  spiritual  agencies 
are  beneficent  and  others  are  maleficent.  The  high  spir¬ 
its  would  be  called  the  high  gods.  But,  in  early  thought 
as  in  naive  thought  to-day,  there  does  not  appear  to  be  any 
clear  distinction  made  between  soul  and  spirit.  The  dis¬ 
tinction,  when  it  does  appear,  is  rather  one  of  degree  than 


plausible  that  I  have  seen.  Because  of  the  immense  part  which 
the  idea  of  immortality  played  in  their  social,  ethical,  and  religious 
beliefs  and  practices,  the  ideas  of  the  ancient  Egyptians  are  of 
peculiar  interest  in  this  connection.  On  the  latter  subject,  see 
J.  H.  Breasted,  Development  of  Religion  and  Thought  in  Ancient 
Egypt.  Belief  in  the  immortality  of  the  soul  is,  of  course,  closely 
bound  up  with  systems  of  ancestor  worship.  The  classical  instance 
of  this  worship  is  the  religion  of  China.  See  especially  the  work 
of  Professor  J.  J.  M.  de  Groot,  Religion  in  China. 


40 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


of  kind.  In  fact,  even  where  thought  has  reached  a  con¬ 
siderable  degree  of  refinement,  as  among  the  Hebrews, 
Greeks,  and  Romans,  the  same  words  may  be  used  for  both 
ideas ;  for  example,  Ruach,  Psyche,  Pneuma,  Anima.  Most 
savage  tribes  believe  in  a  creator  god,  remote  and  inac¬ 
cessible. 

Primitive  man  draws  no  clear  distinction  between  man 
and  animals.  Totemism  considers  some  animals  sacred. 
The  totem  is  an  animal  having  a  mysterious  connection 
with  the  origin  and  well-being  of  the  clan  or  tribe.  Mem¬ 
bers  of  a  totem  clan  do  not  kill  the  animal  of  their  totem 
except  under  special  circumstances.  They  must  marry  out 
of  their  totem.  Plants,  too,  are  supposed  to  be  controlled 
by  the  spirits.  Moreover  the  spirit  of  ancestors  may  or 
may  not  be  deified.4 


III.  Tabu 

This  is  an  important  item  in  primitive  beliefs.  Any¬ 
thing  which  is  tabu  must  not  be  touched.  It  is  set  apart 
— sacred.  A  prohibition  of  any  kind  of  food  is  tabu,  for 
example,  with  the  Jews,  pork,  and  with  the  Hindus,  the 
cow.  To  violate  tabu  would  bring  injury  to  the  clan.  A 
woman  after  childbirth  is  tabu,  also  a  dead  body.  At 
puberty,  boys  and  girls  are  tabu.  The  person  of  the  king, 
and  even  words,  may  be  tabu. 

Why  are  things  tabu?  Because  there  is  believed  to  be 
some  mysterious  power  resident  in  them,  or  associated  with 

4  The  distinction  between  soul  and  spirit  is  not  sharply  drawn  in 
primitive  thought.  The  distinction  between  body  on  the  one  hand, 
and  mana,  soul  or  spirit,  on  the  other  hand,  is  made  in  terms  of 
behavior.  Anything  that  behaves  in  an  unusual  or  unexpected  man¬ 
ner  has  mana,  soul  or  spirit,  in  it.  The  arrow,  fishing  spear,  or 
canoe  that  behaves  queerly  is  possessed  by  mana  or  spirit.  The 
body  is  that  which  behaves  in  the  ordinary  fashion.  At  the  points 
where  social  groups  behave  or  need  to  bel  ave  in  an  unusual  way, 
the  great  spirits  or  gods  are  conceived  and  invoked. 


PRIMITIVE  THOUGHT  41 

them,  in  some  way,  which,  if  the  tabu  is  violated,  will 
work  injury  to  the  violator  or  his  tribal  associates. 

IV.  Magic 

One  of  the  most  striking  features  of  primitive  conduct 
is  the  belief  in  and  use  of  magic.  Magic  consists  of  vari¬ 
ous  special  devices  and  procedures  through  which  control 
of  the  mysterious  powers  which  surround  man  is  obtained 
for  the  advantage  of  the  group  or  the  individual. 

Out  of  the  technic  of  primitive  magic  has  arisen  two 
very  different  types  of  technic.  One  is  the  technic  of  sci¬ 
ence  which  aims,  by  the  use  of  delicate  and  standardized 
instruments  of  observation,  measurement,  and  calculation, 
such  as  fine  balances,  micrometers,  microscopes,  micro¬ 
tomes,  dividing  engines,  statistical  tables,  and  algebraic 
formulas,  at  acquiring  an  accurate  and  economic  intellec¬ 
tual  control  or  shorthand  formulation  of  the  order  of  na¬ 
ture.  The  other  is  religious  technic,  which  aims,  by  its 
symbols,  rites,  prayers,  et  cetera,  at  bringing  into  right 
relation  with  one  another  the  human  group  and  individ¬ 
ual  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  Supreme  Power,  who  is  the 
custodian  and  dispenser  of  the  values  on  participation  in 
which  depend  individual  and  social  well-being,  on  the  other 
hand.  In  brief,  religious  technic  aims  at  vital,  moral,  and 
spiritual  control.  Both  these  technics  have  grown  out  of 
primitive  magic  which  was  primitive  science  and  religion 
in  one.  Religion  and  magic  became  differentiated  as  re¬ 
ligion  came  to  embody  more  clearly  and  rationally  the 
organization  of  human  values  into  a  coherent  and  social¬ 
ized  whole,  and  thus  to  furnish  explicitly  the  motives  and 
sanctions  for  a  higher  social-moral  order ;  while  magic,  in¬ 
capable  of  development  into  an  agency  of  social  moraliza- 
tion  and  rational  spiritualization,  remained  merely  a  tech¬ 
nic  for  the  satisfaction  of  isolated  interests  and  irrational 


42 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


passions.  The  Hebrew-Christian  and  the  Greek  lines  of 
development  are  most  instructive  and  significant  in  this 
regard. 

Magic  is  the  ancestor  of  technology,  the  ancestor  of 
what  we  call  applied  science.  Medicine  springs  from  it. 
The  individual  medicine  man  or  Big  Medicine  among  the 
aboriginal  inhabitants  of  this  continent  was  a  man  who,  by 
reason  of  special  ability  and  training,  was  able  to  do  things 
that  the  ordinary  individual  could  not  do  in  the  way  of 
controlling  mysterious  forces  of  nature.  The  word  ‘‘medi¬ 
cine”  was  applied  not  merely  to  what  we  call  medicine, 
but  to  rain  making,  cloud  making,  wind  making,  getting 
strength  into  the  war  party,  harming  their  enemies,  et 
cetera.  When  we  want  anything  done  in  what  we  call 
the  arts  of  technology,  we  go  to  a  special  individual,  for 
example,  physician,  engineer,  carpenter,  plumber,  who  has 
a  special  training.  The  medicine  man  was  a  man  tech¬ 
nically  trained  and  able  to  control  mysterious  forces.  Of 
course,  the  ordinary  member  of  the  tribe  as  a  hunter, 
fisher,  et  cetera,  had  his  training,  and  he  could  do  the  ordi¬ 
nary  things  in  the  ordinary  way.  But  if  he  wanted  any 
special  thing  done,  he  went  to  the  medicine  man — the 
Shaman. 

Two  kinds  of  magic  are  found,  that  is,  two  kinds  of 
magical  control,  namely: 

1.  Contagious 

2.  Homeopathic 

The  basis  of  the  belief  in  contagious  magic  is  that  power 
is  transmitted  by  contagion,  by  contact  with  some  being 
in  whom  this  power  resides.  That  belief  is  the  source  of 
one  of  the  most  widespread  and  solemn  ceremonies  in  re¬ 
ligion,  the  partaking  of  the  god  in  the  sacred  meal — the 
banquet  with  the  gods. 

Where  totemism  exists,  we  find  that,  whereas  ordinarily 
the  individual  would  not  kill  the  animal,  a  certain  part 


PRIMITIVE  THOUGHT 


43 


of  that  animal  is  eaten  in  the  sacred  meal  and  strength  is 
derived  therefrom.  Cannibalism  is  partly  due  to  this.  The 
savages  did  not  always  eat  the  bodies  of  their  enemies  be¬ 
cause  they  were  hungry.  Possibly  they  had  plenty.  But 
if  the  enemy  were  particularly  strong,  they  would  get  some 
of  the  strength  by  eating  their  bodies.  And  similarly,  if 
the  individual  or  the  tribe,  not  being  able  to  get  hold  of 
the  whole  persons  of  their  enemies,  could  get  hold  of  some 
parts  of  them,  they  could  do  them  deadly  injury.  If  you 
have  his  hair,  clothes,  scalp  lock,  et  cetera,  you  have  the 
enemy  in  your  power.  The  magical  use  of  names  of  birds 
was  due  to  the  supposition  that  extraordinary  power  re¬ 
sided  in  the  names. 

There  is  a  tendency  to  believe,  and  there  are  people  who 
still  believe,  in  the  efficacy  of  the  bones  of  the  saints,  even 
the  very  small  bones  and  fragments  of  their  garments,  to 
cure  diseases.  Some  people,  especially  the  peasantry  of 
Europe,  have  recourse  to  love  charms  and  to  injurious 
magic. 

The  other  form  of  magic  is  homeopathic.  Not  only  like 
cures  like,  but  like  causally  affects  like.  The  original 
dogma  of  homeopathy  is  found  deeply  imbedded  in  primi¬ 
tive  thought.  So,  if  you  could  not  get  hold  of  anything 
belonging  to  your  enemy,  you  might  make  an  effigy  and 
vent  your  anger  on  it.  This  practice  has  come  down  to 
modern  times.  Primitive  man  believed  that  he  was  hurt¬ 
ing  the  original  by  injuring  the  image.  Rain  making, 
wind  making,  cloud  making,  the  dance,  imitating  the  corn 
planting,  imitating  the  activities  of  war  and  the  chase — 
these  procedures  were  means  of  tapping  mana,  the  mys¬ 
terious  force  pervading  nature. 

As  a  familiar  instance  of  homeopathic  magic,  I  would 
cite  the  story  of  the  brazen  serpent.  The  Israelites  on  the 
way  through  the  wilderness  were  attacked  by  a  plague  of 


44 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


serpents,  and  the  brazen  serpent  was  the  means  of  cur¬ 
ing  that  plague  by  homeopathic  magic. 

In  the  course  of  the  development  of  civilized  society,  a 
differentiation  took  place  in  the  magic,  between  black  and 
white  magic.  The  rulers  and  the  people  of  Israel  were 
forbidden  to  have  recourse  to  soothsayers.  We  find  in 
the  Middle  Ages  in  Europe  a  belief  in  black  art,  black 
magic,  evil  eye,  and  various  forms  of  witchcraft,  a  belief 
which  is  still  in  existence  in  the  minds  of  a  good  many 
people  who  still  live  in  the  Dark  Ages.  Many  students  of 
that  subject  have  argued  that,  from  the  first,  there  was  a 
fundamental  difference  between  magic  and  religion.  I  be¬ 
lieve  they  have  one  origin — the  belief  that  superhuman 
agencies  may  be  employed  for  either  human  ill  or  weal. 
The  differentiation  into  magic  and  religion  takes  place 
gradually.  Those  special  and  mysterious  methods,  through 
which  the  mysterious  powers  which  environ  man  are  con¬ 
trolled,  are  placed  in  some  person  or  group  of  persons. 
Of  course,  whatever  ceremony  or  deed  is  for  the  welfare 
of  the  group  is  good.  But  now  the  individuals  who  want 
to  satisfy  their  desires,  their  loves  and  hates  as  individ¬ 
uals,  will  have  recourse  to  magic  to  gratify  a  passion  which 
may  disturb  the  order  of  the  group.  An  individual,  for 
example,  falls  in  love,  and  has  recourse  to  a  magician  to 
get  another  person  as  a  husband  or  wife,  which  may  be 
bad  for  the  social  order.  One  has  a  grudge  against  an 
individual  and  tries  to  bring  him  to  destruction  by  work¬ 
ing  a  magical  agency.  There  thus  arises  a  difference  be¬ 
tween  antisocial  magic  and  religion.  Magic  in  general  is 
a  specialized  kind  of  method  for  obtaining  control  over 
these  mysterious  forces  that  surround  and  invade  the  life 
of  man. 


PRIMITIVE  THOUGHT 


45 


V.  Mythology 

Among  all  primitive  peoples  and  in  the  early  literature 
of  civilized  peoples  we  find  a  great  variety  of  stories  to 
account  for  the  origin  of  the  various  things  in  the  world 
and  to  account  for  how  things  took  place.  Man  asks  from 
the  beginning,  why  and  how?  Why  and  how,  are  the 
questions  which  we  try  to  answer  by  science  and  philoso¬ 
phy.  Myth  is  the  lineal  ancestor  of  science  and  philosophy. 
Myths  are  stories  invented  to  account  for  the  world,  for 
man,  and  for  his  various  customs  and  beliefs ;  in  short,  to 
explain  why  and  how.  We  have,  for  example,  cosmogonic 
myths,  stories  to  account  for  the  origin  of  the  world,  and 
anthropogenic  myths,  to  account  for  the  origin  of  man. 
Then  we  have  stories  to  account  for  the  origin  of  culture. 
We  have  culture  heroes. 

Death  is  not  regarded  as  a  natural  affair  by  primitive 
man.  Death  is  believed  to  be  due  to  the  intervention  of 
some  malevolent  or  at  least  not  well-disposed  power.  Nor¬ 
mally  it  should  not  take  place.  So  we  have  all  through 
history  crude  explanations  of  death,  as  for  example,  the 
influence  of  the  serpent,  the  devil,  sin.  Now  the  fact  that 
many  of  the  stories  seem  very  childish  should  not  blind  us 
to  their  purpose.  St.  Paul  said:  “When  I  was  a  child, 
I  spake  as  a  child,  I  felt  as  a  child,  I  thought  as  a  child ; 
now  that  I  am  become  a  man,  I  have  put  away  childish 
things.”  At  the  time  of  the  origin  of  these  myths,  man¬ 
kind  was  in  a  state  of  intellectual  childhood. 

The  savage  gave  free  play  to  his  imagination,  and  was 
not  checked  by  any  acquired  body  of  scientific  principles 
and  of  scientific  methods  of  procedure.  Nor  was  he 
checked  by  the  evidence  of  the  validity  of  these  principles. 
Consequently  he  thinks  in  pictures,  and  just  as  he  inter¬ 
prets  the  phenomena  of  nature  in  the  way  we  have  seen, 
so  he  must  make  use  of  his  own  crude,  disjointed  picture- 


46 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


thinking  to  account  for  the  origin  of  things.  For  instance, 
to-day,  if  anybody  asks  a  scientist  how  man  came  on  this 
earth,  the  scientist  will  say  that  he  descended  from  an 
apelike  ancestor,  who  lived  in  trees  and  later  developed  lan- 
guage,  invented  fire  and  tools,  and  organized  societies. 
That  is  the  evolutionary  explanation  of  the  how  of  things. 
We  say  that  the  earth  was  formed  through  the  condensa¬ 
tion  of  a  nebula,  or  through  the  aggregation  of  meteoric 
star  dust  on  the  little  core  of  the  planet.  Development  or 
evolution  by  natural  processes  extending  through  immense 
periods  of  time  and  proceeding  from  the  simple  to  the  more 
complex — such  is  our  evolutionary  doctrine  of  the  origins 
of  the  earth,  animals,  and  man. 

When  we  come  to  the  higher  types  of  myth  as  to  the 
origin  of  things,  we  find  two  main  kinds  or  types,  though 
not  all,  perhaps,  can  be  thus  classified.  One  type  of  ex¬ 
planation  of  the  origin  of  things  is  that  they  are  due  to 
a  male  and  a  female  principle.  It  is  very  obvious  why 
man  would  explain  things  in  terms  of  his  own  experience, 
as  due  to  male  and  female  powers.  Another  type  is  the 
notion  that  from  the  beginning  there  were  two  opposing 
natures  in  things.  The  whole  process  of  creation  is  due 
to  the  conflict  of  these  principles.  This  notion  embodies 
on  a  cosmical  scale  that  conflict  which  is  so  universal  a 
feature  of  common  life.  The  Chinese,  for  example,  have 
two  principles,  Yang  and  Yin — light  and  darkness.  Some¬ 
times  they  regard  these  principles  as  male  and  female. 
They  are  opposed  principles,  positive  and  negative.  All 
things  have  sprung  into  being  from  them.  The  Universal 
Order  or  Tao,  the  whole  system  of  heaven  and  earth,  is 
due  to  them.  The  ancient  Persians  have  two  conflicting 
principles.  Sometimes  in  Persian  literature  we  find  the 
view  that  these  two  principles  sprang  from  the  same  orig¬ 
inal  source ;  but  on  the  whole  the  Persian  thought  is  that 


PRIMITIVE  THOUGHT 


47 


two  opposing  principles  were  in  actual  conflict,  namely, 
Ahura  Mazda  and  Ahrimanes. 

We  find,  among  other  peoples,  various  conceptions 
confusedly  intermingled.  For  example,  one  myth  is 
that  the  sky  is  the  female  principle  and  the  earth  the 
male  principle,  and  from  these  all  things  came,  from  a 
primeval  chaos.  Without  any  consistency,  the  ancient 
Egyptians  believed  the  separation  of  earth  and  sky  was 
due  to  the  sun.  They  forgot  their  own  myths  of  the  gene¬ 
sis  of  the  sun  by  the  earth  and  that  the  sun  was  formed 
from  chaos.  Another  conception  was  that  the  sun  god  is 
the  father  of  gods  and  men. 

The  Hebrew  and  Babylonian  myths  have  a  fundamental 
similarity.  They  both  presuppose  a  primeval  chaos. 
Tiamat  is  the  primeval  chaos.  The  Babylonians  conceived 
it  as  water.  And  the  origin  of  things  wTas  due  to  Marduk. 
In  the  book  of  Genesis  it  is  stated  that  ‘‘in  the  beginning 
God  created  the  heavens  and  the  earth,  ’ ?  the  meaning  being, 
not  out  of  nothing,  but  out  of  chaos.  And  the  word  that 
occurs  for  this  primeval  chaos  is  Tehom — “the  abyss.” 
There  is  no  question  but  that  the  story  of  genesis  in  the 
book  of  Genesis  is  an  elevated  form  of  the  Babylonian  story. 

It  is  of  special  interest  to  note  briefly  the  features  of 
some  of  the  main  Greek  cosmogonies  because  mankind 
emancipates  itself  first  from  this  confusion  we  are  dealing 
with,  among  the  Greeks.  Homer  does  not  represent  a  very 
religious  point  of  view.  Some  of  the  actions  of  the  gods 
as  depicted  by  Homer  aroused  the  ire  of  Plato  and  other 
philosophers.  Of  course,  we  are  not  to  take  these  seriously. 
The  Homeric  poems  were  compiled  in  the  present  shape  in  a 
very  sophisticated  civilization  tinged  with  skepticism  and 
irony.  The  original  beings  in  Homer  are  Oceanus — heaven, 
and  Tethys — earth.  But  behind  both  stands  the  goddess 
Night.  The  Orphic  cosmogony  is  similar.  First  was 
Time ;  then  came  Ether  and  Chaos ;  out  of  these  Time 


48 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


formed  a  silver  egg,  from  which  came  Phanes,  god  of  light, 
and  first-born  of  the  gods.  Zeus  swallowed  Phanes  and  the 
world  began  anew.  The  special  god  of  the  Orphic  religion, 
Dionysus,  was  the  son  of  Zeus  and  Persephone. 

Two  other  stories  are  worth  noting.  Hesiod  says  that 
all  things  sprang  from  chaos,  which  meant  space.  From 
space  first  came  Gaia,  the  earthly  mass  and  Eros — love  or 
desire.  Then  sprang  Erebus  and  Night,  then  Ether — day. 
Pherecydes  brings  in  a  trinity  the  first  member  of  which 
is  an  eternal,  spiritual  principle.  The  first  and  mightiest 
is  Zeus ;  then  comes  Chronos — time.  From  Chronos  sprang 
fire,  air,  and  water.  The  third  principle  is  Chthonia, 
Earth-Spirit.  These  three  seem  to  be  alike  eternal,  al¬ 
though  Zeus  is  the  most  powerful  and,  as  Zeus-Eros,  is  the 
principal  agent  in  creation.  It  would  be  interesting  to  com¬ 
pare,  in  some  detail,  the  principal  myths  as  to  the  origins 
of  the  world,  of  gods  and  men,  among  the  chief  culture- 
peoples.  But  I  have  not  space  for  that.  The  general  trend 
seems  to  have  been  from  animatistic,  through  quasi  per¬ 
sonal,  to  rational  and  impersonal  or  superpersonal,  prin¬ 
ciples  of  explanation. 

References  on  the  Primitive  World  View 

*  Avey,  Albert  E.,  Readings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  II. 
Brinton,  Daniel  G.,  The  Religions  of  Primitive  Peoples. 

*  Carpenter,  J.  Estlin,  Comparative  Religion,  Chapters  III 

and  IV. 

*  Clodd,  Edward,  Animism,  sections  1-9. 

*  Coe,  George  A.,  The  Psychology  of  Religion,  Chapters  V, 

VIII,  IX. 

Crawley,  Ernest,  The  Idea  of  the  Soul. 

Durkheim,  Emile,  The  Elementary  Forms  of  the  Religious  Life. 

*  Encyclopcedia  Britannica,  11th  ed.,  Articles  on  “Animism  Magic 

and  Mythology/’ 

*  Encyclopcedia  of  Religion  and  Ethics,  Articles  on  “Cosmogony 

and  Cosmology,”  “Mana  and  Magic.” 


PRIMITIVE  THOUGHT 


49 

*  Frazer,  James  G.,  The  Golden  Bough ,  Vol.  I,  Chapters  I-III. 

*  Haddon,  A.  C.,  Magic  and  Fetishism. 

Jevons,  Frank  Byron,  Introduction  to  the  History  of  Religion. 
Kingsley,  M.  H.,  West  African  Studies,  Chapters  V-VIII. 
Marett,  Robert  R.,  The  Threshold  of  Religion. 

Moore,  G.  F.,  History  of  Religions. 

*  Reinach,  Salomon,  Orpheus,  Chapters  I-IV. 

Thomas,  William  I.,  Source  Book  for  Social  Organs,  pp.  651- 
735. 

Toy,  Crawford  H.,  History  of  Religion. 

See  also  the  series,  American  Lectures  on  the  History  of  Re¬ 
ligions. 

Tylor,  E.  B.,  Primitive  Culture. 

References  on  Greek  and  Hebrew  Religion 

Adam,  James,  The  Religious  Teachers  of  Greece. 

*  Encyclopedia  of  Religion  and  Ethics,  Article  “Israel”  by 

Kennett. 

Cornford,  F.  M.,  From  Religion  to  Philosophy,  pp.  73-122. 
Cumont,  Franz,  Astrology  and  Religion  among  the  Greeks  and 
Romans. 

*  Encyclopedia  Britannica,  11th  ed.,  Articles  “Greek  Religion  and 

Hebrew  Religion.” 

Fowler,  H.  T.,  History  of  Hebrew  Religion. 

*  Gunkel,  H.,  Legends  of  Genesis. 

*  Iyautsch,  E.,  “Religion  of  Israel,”  in  Hastings’  Dictionary  of 

the  Bible. 

*  Murray,  Gilbert,  Four  Stages  of  Greek  Religion. 

Robertson  Smith,  W.,  Religion  of  the  Semites. 


CHAPTER  III 


THE  DIFFERENTIATION  OF  PHILOSOPHY  AND  SCIENCE  FROM 

RELIGION 

I.  The  Rise  of  Philosophy  to  Independence 

The  first  influence  that  made  for  independent  intellec¬ 
tual  inquiry  into  things  was  the  breakdown  of  the  primitive 

world  view.  In  order  that  man  mav  understand  and  con- 

%/ 

trol  the  forces  operative  in  the  world,  it  is  necessary  that 
he  discover  the  sequences  among  phenomena.  Now  when 
man  discovers  that  there  is  regularity  of  sequential  rela¬ 
tions  among  phenomena,  that  is  a  discovery  of  what  we  call 
the  causal  relation,  that  is  to  say,  one  thing  is  invariably 
dependent  for  its  appearance  on  other  things.  The  regu¬ 
lar  antecedent  is  cause,  and  the  regular  consequent  is  effect. 

From  the  beginning  man  must  have  tried,  in  so  far  as 
he  exercised  his  intelligence,  to  discover  causal  relations, 
and,  as  I  have  pointed  out,  the  primitive  world  view  is  a 
theory  of  the  causal  dependencies,  of  the  regular  sequences 
of  events.  And  from  that  theory  there  follow  certain  prac¬ 
tices.  Magic  and  religion  aim  at  methods  of  control  over 
the  causes  of  things.  Surrounded  by  mysterious  forces 
that  affected  him,  that  operated  on  him  for  weal  or  woe, 
early  man  formulated  a  theory  of  the  characters  of  these 
forces  from  his  experience.  He  regarded  things  that  af¬ 
fected  him  as  expressions  of  forces,  spirits,  gods,  as  mys¬ 
terious  or  supernatural  operations,  and  devised  means  to 
control  them.  Science  to-day  is  concerned  with  the  same 
problem.  But  between  our  science  and  practice,  and  the 

50 


THE  DIFFERENTIATION  OF  PHILOSOPHY  51 


beliefs  and  practices  of  primitive  man  lies  the  whole  history 
of  science  and  philosophy  as  independent  enterprises. 

There  are  three  fallacies  to  which  the  primitive  man  was 
prone.  There  are  many  fallacies,  but  these  are  the  three 
most  prevalent  and  persistent.  The  modern  man  is  still 
a  prey  to  them.  A  training  in  scientific  habits  of  inves¬ 
tigation  and  of  persistency  in  analyzing  things  into  their 
elements,  is  to  get  rid  of  the  influences  of  these  fallacies. 

Thev  are : 

1.  “Post  hoc  ergo  propter  hoc  ” 

2.  The  neglect  of  negative  instances 

3.  Classification  by  means  of  superficial  resemblances 
The  fallacy  of  “post  hoc  ergo  propter  hoc”  in  English 
means  this :  That  because  we  once  or  twice  observe  one 
thing  to  follow  another,  therefore,  that  which  follows,  is 
the  effect  of  that  which  it  follows  upon.  Conversely,  that 
which  we  have  occasionally  observed  to  immediately  pre¬ 
cede  an  event  is  the  cause.  Because  of  man’s  native  pro¬ 
pensity  to  jump  to  conclusions,  a  single  instance  of  a  se¬ 
quence  will  be  taken  as  evidence  of  a  causal  dependence. 
His  primitive  and  persistent  credulity  makes  such  a  be¬ 
lief,  once  formed,  very  difficult  to  dislodge.  The  supersti¬ 
tions  that  still  prevail  among  human  beings,  especially  femi¬ 
nine  beings,  are  due  to  the  persistence  of  primitive  causal 
theories  and  beliefs  that  owe  their  rise  to  this  fallacy.  For 
example,  that  it  is  unlucky  to  take  journeys  on  Friday; 
certain  things  bring  bad  luck ;  thirteen  is  an  unlucky  num¬ 
ber,  because  disasters  have  occurred  when  something  was 
done  on  the  13th,  or  thirteen  were  at  the  table — these  are 
instances  of  primitive  causal  theories. 

Now,  suppose  the  members  of  a  tribe  were  starting  on 
a  hunting  expedition  and  something  unusual  happened, 
as,  for  example,  there  was  a  great  clap  of  thunder,  a  bril¬ 
liant  flash  of  lightning,  or  strange  birds  flew  across  the 
sky.  Anything  strange  arrested  attention.  To  primitive 


52 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


man,  anything  that  is  mysterious  has  supernatural  sig¬ 
nificance.  They  started  out  with  that  in  their  minds. 
They  went  on  and  were  defeated,  or  did  not  get  game,  or 
the  game  turned  on  them  and  some  of  them  were  killed. 
Immediately  the  conclusion  followed  naturally,  that  there 
was  a  causal  connection,  that  they  should  not  have  started, 
or  that  they  should  have  propitiated  the  spirits  who  sent 
the  birds  or  the  lightning.  We  only  are  able  to  eliminate 
these  fallacies  by  a  thoroughly  exact  analysis  which  leads 
us  to  determine  that  there  is  some  constant  relation. 

Now,  as  to  the  fallacy  of  making  further  observation 
suit  one’s  already  formed  belief  and  neglecting  the  nega¬ 
tive  instances ;  having  observed  that  once  or  twice  A  fol¬ 
lows  B,  the  conclusion  that  A  always  follows  B  is  made, 
and  men  never  look  for  the  instances  in  which  A  occurs 
and  there  is  no  B ;  and  they  never  try  to  analyze  A  and 
B  to  separate  relevant  from  irrelevant  factors.  The 
tendency  to  neglect  negative  instances  is  a  consequence  of 
that  primitive  tendency  to  believe  what  one  sees  in  the 
lump,  without  further  inquiry.1  Suppose,  for  example, 
you  believe  in  the  prophetic  significance  of  dreams.  When¬ 
ever  a  dream  occurs  that  turns  out  to  be  even  vaguely 
anticipatory  of  a  later  occurrence,  you  will  chalk  it  down 
and  other  dreams  will  be  overlooked.  This  is  often  the 
sole  source  of  belief  in  the  efficacy  of  certain  therapeutic 
methods.  You  take  some  medicine  and  get  well.  The 
medicine  may  have  had  nothing  to  do  with  it.  Nature 
cures  ninety  per  cent  of  ills.  So  the  doctor,  no  matter 
what  the  trouble  is,  has  a  tremendous  advantage  over  the 
credulous  patient,  because  when  a  person  is  in  distress, 
physical  or  mental,  and  looks  for  some  remedy,  and  is  told 
by  someone  else  that  something  is  good,  whether  faith  heal¬ 
ing  or  medicine,  immediately,  if  he  gets  well,  the  patient 


i  As  Mr.  Crawley  well  puts  it,  primitive  thinking  is  done  in  terms 
of  totalities  or  wholes. 


THE  DIFFERENTIATION  OF  PHILOSOPHY  53 


concludes  that  it  was  the  consequence  of  the  advised 
remedy. 

The  following  is  a  story  from  the  ancient  Greeks.  A 
certain  Greek  was  skeptical  as  to  the  power  of  Neptune 
— -in  Greek,  Poseidon — to  really  control  the  waves.  A 
friend  took  him  into  the  temple  and  showed  him  a  large 
number  of  votive  offerings  that  had  been  put  into  the 
temple  by  sailors  and  fishermen,  who  had  called  upon  Nep¬ 
tune  and  the  sea  had  become  calm.  This  proved  the  case 
to  the  pious  believer.  But  the  skeptic  said,  “Before  I  make 
up  my  mind  I  would  like  to  hear  from  those  who  were 
drowned”;  that  is,  to  hear  the  negative  instances  of  those 
who  had  called  upon  Neptune  in  vain.  It  is  very  hard  for 
humankind  not  to  make  up  its  mind  until  it  hears  from 
the  drowned.  Most  people  tend  to  jump  to  conclusions. 

The  third  persistent  fallacy  is  classification  by  means  of 
superficial  resemblances.  Identity  of  nature  and  opera¬ 
tion  is  attributed  to  things  that  look  alike  in  outline  or 
behavior.  A  stick,  a  stone,  or  a  cloud  looks  or  moves  as  an 
animal  or  man  might;  therefore  it  is  animated  by  similar 
motives.  The  trees  in  the  forest  or  the  wind  at  sundown  or 
dawn  make  sounds  like  the  voice  of  men  or  animals,  there¬ 
fore  they  are  alive.  Animatism  has  one  of  its  most  power¬ 
ful  supports  in  this  mode  of  reasoning  which  is,  of  course, 
the  primitive  form  of  the  argument  from  analogy.  Re¬ 
semblance  or  analogy  furnishes  one  of  the  permanent  modes 
of  arranging  facts  in  order,  but  we  must  weigh  as  well  as 
count  the  points  of  likeness  and  balance  them,  as  to  both 
weight  and  number,  against  the  differences.  This  pre¬ 
caution  the  primitive  mind  commonly  fails  to  observe. 

What  leads  to  the  breakdown  of  faith  in  the  primitive 
world  view  ?  The  development  of  civilization ;  the  growth 
of  social  organization ;  the  establishment  of  stable,  well 
ordered  states ;  the  development  in  the  arts  of  life,  agri¬ 
culture,  and  the  industrial  arts.  When  civilization  de- 


54 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


velops  so  that  it  includes  a  large  number  of  families  with 
stable  civil  organization,  and  advance  is  made  in  agricul¬ 
ture,  w’orks  of  architecture,  engineering,  and  the  household 
arts,  and  especially  when  one  people  comes  into  contact 
with  other  peoples  and  observes  differences  in  customs  and 
arts,  keen-minded  individuals  make  discoveries.  They  dis¬ 
cover  that  the  primitive  theory  does  not  work;  that  good 
crops  do  not  always  follow  on  the  propitiation  of  the  gods ; 
that  success  in  war  does  not  always  follow  upon  the  pro¬ 
pitiation  of  the  deities  and  supernatural  powers.  They 
discover  that  beliefs  running  back  to  immemorial  antiquity 
are  often  a  hindrance  to  the  welfare  and  progress  of  the 
individual  and  the  group.  In  other  words,  a  question 
arises  as  to  the  validity  of  these  beliefs,  because  they  do 
not  produce  the  results  expected.  In  fact  they  may  pro¬ 
duce  bad  results. 

By  familiarity  with  the  qualities  of  natural  objects 
gained  through  manual  work,  men  discovered  that  there  is 
a  regularity  of  sequence  and  a  constancy  of  behavior  in 
things,  and  that  you  can  get  certain  results  only  by  taking 
account  of  certain  qualities.  It  is  discovered  that  by  rub¬ 
bing  amber  you  can  get  sparks,  and  if  you  do  not  rub,  no 
incantation  will  bring  forth  the  sparks. 

The  development  of  political  life  through  the  organiza¬ 
tion  of  strong  and  stable  states  leads  to  higher  moral  con¬ 
ceptions.  Some  of  the  old  customs  are  seen  to  be  hin¬ 
drances  to  the  proper  conduct  of  business,  industry,  and 
to  proper  administration  and  the  progress  of  social  order. 
The  development  of  social  life  in  stability,  the  growth  of 
justice,  the  definition  of  property  rights,  rights  of  con¬ 
tract,  the  growth  of  man’s  whole  moral  and  social  life  as 
a  member  of  society,  bring  to  pass  an  increasing  recognition 
of  the  significance  of  the  personality  of  the  individual. 
There  is  more  leisure,  more  opportunity,  more  scope  for 
exceptional  individuals,  for  inventors  and  critics  of  the 


THE  DIFFERENTIATION  OF  PHILOSOPHY  55 


established  beliefs  and  customs.  The  discoveries  of  new 
ways  of  thinking  are  always  made  by  individuals.  Masses 
of  men  never  discover  anything,  never  invent  anything. 
It  is  always  the  exceptional  individual  who  creates  new 
ideas  and  values.  The  crowd  is  irrational,  imitative,  and 
subject  to  the  influence  of  suggestion.  Therefore,  the  type 
of  society  in  which  there  is  development,  scope,  and  stimu¬ 
lation  for  the  exceptional  individual,  is  the  type  of  society 
which  progresses  most  rapidly  in  the  arts  and  sciences, 
which  progresses  intellectually  and  spiritually. 

Our  intellectual  culture  is  descended  from  the  Graeco- 
Roman  culture  system.  Our  culture  is  a  continuation  of  the 
European  culture,  and  what  I  have  to  say  about  the  genesis 
of  philosophy  and  science  will  have  no  reference  to  the 
history  of  India  or  China.  Up  to  the  present  time,  China 
has  had  no  influence  on  the  development  of  our  culture,  and 
India  has  had  hardly  any.  So  it  is  the  development  of 
European  science  and  philosophy,  of  which  we  are  the  heirs, 
that  I  am  concerned  with. 

The  earliest  important  civilizations  were  along  the  rivers, 
in  the  fertile  river  valleys.  Assyria  and  Egypt  attained 
a  high  degree  of  development  in  written  language,  social 
organization,  agriculture,  and  the  mechanical  arts.  Some 
of  their  architectural  achievements  are  still  sources  of 
wonder,  and  their  social  and  religious  ideas  were  the  an¬ 
cestors  of  some  of  the  most  fundamental  ideas  of  the 
Hebrews  and  even  of  the  Greeks. 

The  nekt  period  of  civilization  after  the  river  period  was 
the  Mediterranean.  The  shores  of  the  Mediterranean  were 
naturally  favorable  environs  for  the  development  of  civi¬ 
lization.  It  is  not  very  large,  the  shores  are  near  enough 
together  to  promote  traffic,  the  climate  is  good,  there  are 
clear  skies,  varied  rocky  shores,  fertile  plains,  and  pic¬ 
turesque  river  valleys.  Apparently  in  the  island  of  Crete 
there  developed  a  high  degree  of  civilization,  the  Minoan 


56 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


civilization.  Crete  was  one  center  of  its  advancement,  but 
it  was  not  confined  to  Crete.  Asia  Minor,  the  Hellespont, 
and  other  contiguous  regions  had  their  share  in  it.  This 
civilization  spread  over  the  whole  region  and  probably  over 
a  large  part  of  the  Mediterranean  littoral. 

There  came  down  upon  this  early  civilization  and  con¬ 
quered  the  representatives  of  it,  a  people  whom  we  call  the 
Greeks,  and  who  call  themselves  Hellenes.  They  were  in 
many  respects  less  highly  civilized  than  the  people  they 
conquered.  They  were  Aryans,  the  race  which  we  belong 
to.  The  Greeks  had  certain  common  features  in  their 
physical  build,  the  shape  of  the  head,  et  cetera,  which  char¬ 
acterized  them.2  A  great  advance  in  civilization,  I  think, 
has  always  involved  intimate  contact  of  two  peoples.  An 
isolated  people  does  not  advance.  And  the  contact  of  the 
Hellenes  with  the  other  peoples  stimulated  the  Hellenes. 
It  gave  them  material  to  work  on,  and  they  worked  in  a 
favorable  environment.  The  geography  of  the  eastern 
Mediterranean  is  favorable  to  the  development  of  human 
culture.  There  were  beautiful  promontories,  inland  moun¬ 
tains  and  valleys,  good  climate  and  plenty  of  sunshine, 
which  afford  favorable  conditions  to  stimulate  humankind. 
The  economic  conditions  were  also  good,  material  wants 
were  easily  provided  for  in  a  genial  clime  and  with  slave 
labor. 

This  is  where  we  find  the  origins  of  science.  Why  were 
the  Greeks  so  keen  and  creative  ?  Originally,  why  did  they 
possess  such  eager  curiosity,  such  fertility  of  thought  ? 
Thev  must  have  had  them  from  the  first,  to  some  extent. 
Somehow,  in  their  racial  characteristics,  there  was  a  capac¬ 
ity  for  more  advanced  civilization.  They  intermarried  with 
the  aboriginal  inhabitants.  The  most  progressive  races  are 
always  mixed  races.  The  parents  of  science  and  philoso- 


2  Perhaps  the  invaders  were  of  the  same  racial  stock  as  the  more 
civilized  people  whom  they  conquered.  This  is  an  unsettled  question. 


THE  DIFFERENTIATION  OF  PHILOSOPHY  57 


phy  are  the  Greeks.  Science  and  philosophy’s  first  inde¬ 
pendent  disciples  appeared  about  600  B.  C. 

The  Greeks  were  traders,  industrialists,  travelers.  One 
of  the  richest  Greek  cities  of  that  time  was  Miletus,  the 
birthplace  of  science  and  philosophy.  Thales  of  Miletus, 
who  flourished  about  585  B.  C.,  was  the  first  philosopher 
and  physicist.  His  school  was  called  the  Milesian  School. 
Of  his  school  were  Anaximander,  who  flourished  about 
570  B.  C.,  and  Anaximenes,  who  flourished  about  540  B.  C. 
The  general  term  applied  to  the  Greek  colonists  on  the  coast- 
dand  of  Asia  Minor  and  the  adjacent  islands  is  “Ionian.” 
They  were  one  of  the  main  divisions  of  the  Greek  race. 
Thales  is  the  father  of  Ionian  philosophy. 

II.  The  Development  of  Early  Greek  Philosophy 

The  two  basic  and  interconnected  problems  that  arise 
when  man  begins  to  reflect  systematically  upon  the  course 
of  nature,  are:  1.  What  is  the  permanent  stuff  or  sub¬ 
stance  which  endures  through  all  the  mutations  of  finite 
and  transitory  existences?  Is  this  stuff  one,  or  many,  in 
kind  ?  2.  What  is  the  cause ,  or  what  are  the  causes,  of  the 

incessant  origination,  change,  and  decease  of  finite  beings? 

The  perennial  significance  of  the  Ionian  or  first  Greek 
philosophers,  lies  in  the  fact  that  they  all  attempted  an¬ 
swers  to  the  two  fundamental  questions  of  thought  in  regard 
to  nature  by  concepts  that  ivere  formed  by  reflection  upon 
the  observed  facts  of  nature.  They  were  all  rationalists, 
in  that  they  assumed  that  all  the  seemingly  chaotic  changes, 
all  the  diversified  qualities  in  nature,  are  the  results  of  an 
order  that  can  be  apprehended  by  human  reason.  By 
the  exercise  of  observation  and  thought  man  can  under¬ 
stand  nature  and  his  own  place  in  it.  They  were  natural¬ 
ists  in  the  sense  that  they  held  nature  and  man  to  be  prod¬ 
ucts  of  the  same  universal  order  or  causation. 


58 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


In  their  various  essays  to  interpret  the  world  in  terms 
of  reason,  the  Ionians  hit  upon  the  most  basic  questions  of 
metaphysics:  1.  What  is  the  nature  of  the  permanent  or 
eternal  Order  of  Being?  2.  What  are  the  causes  or  forces 
by  which  the  permanent  being  is  diversified  ceaselessly  into 
the  multiform  and  ever  changing  procession  of  finite  be¬ 
ings?  What  causes  the  incessant  transformations  of  the 
permanent  substance  or  substances  of  things?  3.  What  is 
the  relation  between  Being  and  Becoming,  Permanence  and 
Change,  Eternity  and  Time?  4.  Is  the  enduring  Being 
one,  or  are  there  many  enduring  beings  and,  if  so,  are 
they  the  same  or  different  in  kind?  This  is  the  problem 
of  Singularism  and  Pluralism  discussed  in  its  modern 
forms  in  Chapter  XXIV. 

Thales  said  that  the  first  principle  of  things,  the  sub¬ 
stance  or  stuff  of  all  things,  was  water.  This  does  not  seem 
like  a  very  significant  statement.  The  cosmogonies  had 
already  said  that  Oceanus  was  first.  We  have  traditions 
that  Thales  did  various  things.  He  was  a  mathematician 
and  astronomer,  and  foretold  an  eclipse.  But  for  our  pur¬ 
pose,  the  important  point  is,  what  is  the  significance  of  the 
theory  that  the  substance  of  things  is  water  ?  Thales  held 
that  every  finite  thing  that  comes  into  existence  is  a  modi¬ 
fication  of  water.  He  held  the  view  that,  by  condensation 
and  rarefaction  of  water,  all  things  rise,  and  he  actually 
attempted  an  evolutionary  account  of  the  genesis  of  man, 
and  plants,  and  animals.  Thales  regarded  the  substance, 
water,  as  having  in  it  life.  None  of  these  early  thinkers 
recognized  any  distinction  between  living  and  nonliving, 
or  mental  and  nonmental.  They  believed  that  every  par¬ 
ticle  of  the  substance  of  things  had  the  germ  of  life  in  it. 
They  were  all  Hylozoists.  In  other  words,  for  them  Reality 
is  living  matter.  They  were  all,  in  a  broad  sense,  Evolu¬ 
tionists. 

Anaximenes  said  air  or  the  ether  is  the  substance  of 


THE  DIFFERENTIATION  OF  PHILOSOPHY  59 


things.  Anaximander  said  that  the  unlimited  (to  apeiron), 
a  boundless,  animated  mass,  is  the  substance  of  things. 

Why  does  Thales’  theory  constitute  the  birth  of  inde¬ 
pendent  philosophy  and  science?  First,  it  is  a  natural 
principle ,  one  natural  substance,  and  not  a  multitude  of 
mysterious  spirits;  an  empirical  substance  is  made  the  stuff 
and  cause  of  all  things.  Second,  Thales,  I  think,  was  un¬ 
doubtedly  led  to  his  view  by  observation  and  reflection 
upon  the  mutations  that  water  undergoes,  its  rarefaction 
and  condensation.  It  solidifies  into  ice  and  rarefies  into 
vapor.  It  enters  into  so  many  things,  into  rocks  and 
breaks  them.  Things  die  without  water,  with  enough 
water  they  flourish.  Thales  lived  on  an  island  in  the 
ASgean  Sea  off  the  coast  of  Asia  Minor,  and  his  situation 
possibly  suggested  his  hypothesis  that  water  was  the  basic 
and  all-inclusive  substance  of  things. 

Herein  lay  the  significance  of  the  first  theories  advanced 
by  the  Ionians,  Thales  and  his  disciples ;  these  theories  all 
have  this  in  common,  however  otherwise  they  may  conceive 
the  one  substance,  that  they  consist  in  the  notion  that  there 
is  one  natural  substance,  stuff,  material,  out  of  which  all 
things  are  fashioned,  and  that  the  whole  variety  of  par¬ 
ticular  things  which  exist,  animals,  plants,  men,  as  well 
as  rocks,  air,  ocean,  the  whole  variety  and  the  endless  suc¬ 
cession  of  actual  beings,  are  fashioned  out  of  the  one  nat¬ 
ural  substance,  the  primeval  stuff  which  is  not  conceived 
as  merely  material.  Its  material  characteristics  are  most 
obvious,  but  it  is  dynamic  and  living,  and  is  distributed 
throughout  the  entire  world,  and  all  things  arise  from  it 
through  the  operation  of  natural  causes.  So  this  one  sub¬ 
stance  is  living  matter  (Hylozoism). 

Now,  once  a  conception  of  this  sort  has  been  definitely 
formulated  and  shaped,  there  are  several  questions  which 
logically  arise.  And  the  first  question  which  arises  is  this : 
What  is  permanent  amidst  or  through  all  the  ceaseless 


60 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


changes  in  'particular  being s?  If  the  primeval  stuff  is  con¬ 
stantly  undergoing  modification ,  then  it  never  exists  as 
such  in  the  form  in  ivhich  it  is  conceived.  What  is  it  that 
is  permanent?  That  is  the  first  question.  The  second 
question  is:  What  is  the  cause,  or  the  causes,  of  the  cease¬ 
less  flux,  the  endless  modification  of  things,  things  arising, 
changing,  passing  away,  and  neiv  ones  arising?  The  clear¬ 
ness  and  consistency  with  which  the  early  Greek  philoso¬ 
phers  raised  and  answered  these  various  questions,  once 
they  hit  upon  the  trail,  is  a  mark  of  their  genius. 

One  of  the  greatest  thinkers,  Heraclitus  (538-475  B.  C.), 
of  Ephesus,  a  city  of  Asia  Minor,  on  the  coast,  answered 
the  question  by  saying  that  nothing  is  permanent,  all  is 
change,  ceaseless  flux  is  the  nature  of  things.  There  is  no 
substance  that  retains  the  same  characteristics  and  qualities. 
The  world  of  nature  is  the  theater  of  incessant  mutation, 
“panta  rei,”  navia  pel,  all  things  flow.  But  all  change 
takes  place  in  an  orderly  fashion,  according  to  the  eter¬ 
nally  fixed  law  or  decree — Logos,  which  in  Greek  means 
both  word  and  reason,  or  thought,  expressed.  The  Logos 
is  the  divine  reason  immanent  in  the  cosmos. 

This  conception  of  Heraclitus  is  the  ancestor  of  our  doc¬ 
trine  of  natural  law.  So  far  as  the  actual  course  of  par¬ 
ticular  things  is  concerned,  their  unending  fate  is  cease¬ 
lessly  to  arise  and  to  pass  away,  but  this  fate  is  not  the 
expression  of  the  wills  of  animated  beings  or  spirits,  nor  is 
it  the  result  of  chance.  It  is  the  expression  of  rational 
order  in  the  universe,  and  that  rational  order  Heraclitus 
identified  with  God — Zeus. 

Now  as  to  the  causes  of  change,  the  doctrine  of  Logos 
or  Reason  or  Universal  Law  means  that  there  is  no  dis¬ 
order.  There  is  nothing  that  happens  without  reason  or 
cause.  As  to  the  question,  what  is  the  ultimate  cause,  what 
in  the  last  analysis  is  it  that  keeps  things  going,  why  this 
constant  cyclical  process  of  generation  and  decease, 


THE  DIFFERENTIATION  OF  PHILOSOPHY  61 


Heraclitus  says  strife  is  the  father  of  all  things  finite. 
Struggle  or  conflict  is  an  inexpugnable  feature  of  reality. 
This  old  Greek  thinker  anticipated  by  many  centuries  the 
Darwinian  doctrine  of  the  struggle  for  existence,  as  well  as 
Hegel’s  doctrine  of  the  development  of  reality  through 
conflict.  “War  is  the  father  and  king  of  all  things.”  The 
world  is  the  theater  of  the  ceaseless  conflict,  with  ever  vary¬ 
ing  results,  of  two  opposing  tendencies,  the  tendency 
toward  discord,  and  the  tendency  toward  harmony.  But 
whichever  may  be  in  the  ascendancy  at  a  particular  time 
in  a  particular  region  of  the  universe,  whichever  may  have 
the  upper  hand,  whether  it  be  peace  or  war,  all  takes  place 
according  to  law,  according  to  reason,  according  to  the 
eternal  divine  order. 

As  to  the  stuff,  the  substance  of  things,  Heraclitus  re¬ 
garded  fire  as  the  best  symbol,  the  nearest  approximation 
that  we  have  in  experience.  That  may  be  conceived  as  the 
primary  stuff.  This  is  one  radical  solution  of  the  problems 
of  the  relations  of  change  and  permanence,  multiplicity  and 
unity. 

But  another  equally  radical  solution  and  way  to  get  rid 
of  the  problem  of  the  opposition  between  the  ceaseless 
changes  that  the  world  shows  and  the  permanence  of  the 
primary  stuff,  is  to  say  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as 
change.  And  this  is  the  way  that  Parmenides  of  Elea,  who 
flourished  about  475  B.  C.,  solved  the  question.  For  him 
the  substance  of  things  is  one  and  unchangeable.  Conse¬ 
quently,  all  the  changes  which  we  see  are  illusory,  and  all 
the  multiplicity  that  we  see  in  things  is  illusion.  There 
is  no  motion  or  change  in  reality,  that  too  is  an  illusion  of 
our  senses.  There  is  no  growth  and  decay  in  reality,  and 
there  is  no  plurality  of  beings,  there  is  one  and  only  one 
substance — “hen  kai  pan,”  £v  k ai  nav,  the  One  and  All. 

Parmenides  was  probably  stimulated  by  Xenophanes, 
who  was  a  religious  poet.  He  was  especially  interested  in 


62 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


the  religious  aspect  of  philosophy  and  insisted  that  there 
was  but  one  supreme  and  divine  being.  He  criticized  the 
popular  doctrine  of  the  gods,  saying  that  the  Ethiopian’s 
gods  were  Ethiopians  in  color  and  made  in  the  image  of 
the  worshipper  himself,  and  that  an  ox’s  god  would  be  like 
an  ox.  He  criticized  the  attribution  of  human  qualities 
to  the  gods.  Parmenides  solves  the  problem  of  the  con¬ 
trast  between  permanence  and  change,  unity  and  plurality, 
by  saying  that  what  we  call  change,  growth  and  decay, 
birth  and  death,  are  illusions.  What  we  apparently  see 
through  our  senses,  that  there  exist  a  multitude  of  beings, 
the  things  I  see  with  my  eyes  and  touch  with  my  hands,  all 
these  perceptions  are  illusions.  There  is  only  one  being. 
He  conceived  the  One  as  like  a  material  sphere,  because 
the  sphere  was  round  and  complete.  And  he  defended  his 
theory  by  arguments,  showing  the  irrationality  of  belief 
in  change  and  multiplicity.  Zeno,  his  disciple,  with  great 
acuteness,  developed  a  series  of  contradictions  involved  in 
the  assumption  that  motion  is  real  (the  Achilles,  the  flying 
arrow)  ;  that  there  exists  a  plurality  of  beings  (the  infinite 
divisibility  and  the  infinite  extensibility  paradoxes).  These 
contradictions,  he  says,  show  the  utter  untrustworthiness 
of  the  senses. 

Zeno  had  for  his  primary  aim  the  task  of  refuting  the 
assumption  that  reality  is  many  and  changing.  Zeno 
shows  that  belief  in  the  senses  lands  us  in  contradictions. 
If  knowledge  is  reached  by  perception,  then  if  a  corn- 
measure  full  of  corn  be  taken  and  the  corn  be  dropped  on 
the  floor,  a  noise  will  be  heard.  Then,  if  we  take  one  grain 
and  drop  it,  it  ought  to  make  a  noise,  but  it  does  not.  Thus, 
in  this  instance,  the  senses  deceive  us.  The  senses  declare 
that  many  things  exist,  but  if  the  many  things  do  exist, 
they  must  be  made  of  indivisible  units.  These  units  can 
have  no  magnitude,  but  if  the  component  units  can  have 
no  magnitude,  then  the  sum  has  no  magnitude.  If  there 


THE  DIFFERENTIATION  OF  PHILOSOPHY  63 


are  any  two  objects,  then  between  the  two  there  must  be 
a  third,  and  between  these  again  there  must  be  still  an¬ 
other,  and  so  on  indefinitely,  therefore  being  must  have 
infinite  magnitude.  In  regard  to  the  phenomenon  of 
motion,  Zeno  shows  that  those  who  hold  that  there  is  motion 
appeal  to  the  senses.  And  in  the  discussion  of  this  ques¬ 
tion,  the  well-known  paradox  of  the  flying  arrow,  and  that 
of  Achilles  and  the  tortoise,  are  given.  An  arrow  in  order 
to  pass  from  one  point  to  another  must  pass  through  an 
infinite  number  of  points  in  a  finite  time ;  moreover,  if  at 
one  instant  it  be  at  one  point  and  at  the  next  instant  at 
another  point,  it  must  have  passed  from  the  one  to  the 
other  point  in  no  time.  If  Achilles  runs  ten  miles  per 
hour  and  the  tortoise  one  mile  per  hour,  and  if  the  tor¬ 
toise  be  given  one  hour's  start,  Achilles  can  never  catch 
the  tortoise.  For  while  he  covers  the  first  mile,  the  tor¬ 
toise  will  cover  one-tenth  of  a  mile,  and  while  Achilles 
covers  the  one  tenth  mile,  the  tortoise  will  cover  one-hun¬ 
dredth  of  a  mile,  and  so  on  forever.  Since  any  finite  dis¬ 
tance  is  made  up  of  an  infinite  number  of  positions,  no 
finite  space  can  be  traversed  by  a  moving  object  in  a  finite 
time.  Motion  is  impossible.  Zeno’s  arguments  are  all 
aimed  at  proving  the  utter  untrustworthiness  of  sense-per¬ 
ception.  His  conclusion  is  that  through  reason  alone  have 
we  knowledge  of  the  one  and  unchanging  Being  or  Reality. 

Now,  of  course,  Parmenides  and  Zeno  did  not  have  to 
solve  the  problem,  what  is  the  cause  of  change?  There 
is  no  need  to  seek  for  a  cause  if  there  is  no  change  or 
plurality  to  be  accounted  for.  But  they  escaped  that  prob¬ 
lem  to  face  another,  namely,  what  is  the  cause  of  the  illu¬ 
sion  that  we  are  all  under?  What  is  the  cause  of  the  uni¬ 
versal  belief  that  there  is  change  and  multiplicity?  They 
failed  to  explain  this  satisfactorily,  and  that  failure  is  an 
immediate  factor  in  developing  a  consciousness  of  a  new 


64 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


problem,  namely,  that  of  knowledge  and  error.  The  very 
difficult  and  important  question  arises  as  to  why  we  should 
err  and  how  we  can  know  anything,  if  our  senses  are  wholly 
untrustworthy. 

The  Eleatics  solved  the  problem  of  permanence  and 
change  by  eliminating  change.  Heraclitus  solved  it  by 
making  change  universal  and  by  affirming  that  the  only 
thing  which  is  permanent  is  the  law  and  order  of  change. 
Another  series  of  thinkers  tried  in  various  ways  to  com¬ 
bine  the  two  notions.  Empedocles  of  Agrigentum  (495- 
435  B.  C.)  advanced  the  theory  that  there  are  four  ele¬ 
ments.  These  are  permanent:  earth,  air,  fire,  and  water. 
He  took  these  from  the  myth-makers,  his  predecessors. 
These  are  the  permanent  and  original  things.  The  suc¬ 
cession  of  particular  beings  that  constitute  our  world  is 
due  to  the  intermixture  of  these  elements  in  various  pro¬ 
portions.  They  are  always  being  mixed  and  separated, 
combined,  dissolved,  and  recombined.  And  he  conceived 
every  particular  thing  as  a  mechanical  mixture  of  the  four 
elements.  As  to  the  cause  of  this  intermixture,  he  says 
there  are  two  forces  that  exist  through  all  time,  they  are 
eternal — Love  and  Hate.  This  is  a  more  pictorial  form  of 
Heraclitus’  doctrine  of  harmony  and  discord.  Love  and 
hate  are  always  striving  against  one  another.  This  is  the 
reason  why  we  have  in  nature  the  ceaseless  succession  of 
all  sorts  of  things  and  events.  It  is  worth  noting  that 
Heraclitus,  Empedocles  and  others  believed  that  the  course 
of  the  universe  runs  in  cycles. 

Anaxagoras  of  Clazomenae  (500-428  B.  C.)  was  another 
early  Greek  thinker  who  formulated  an  original  theory  of 
permanence  and  change,  or  unity  and  multiplicity.  Like 
Empedocles  and  Leucippus,  his  idea  was  that  the  substance 
of  things  consists  of  indestructible  elements.  His  elements 
he  calls  seeds,  spermata.  Aristotle  calls  them  homoiomeries 


THE  DIFFERENTIATION  OF  PHILOSOPHY  65 


—-like  parts.  Anaxagoras  says  that,  when  we  analyze  our 
perceptions,  we  find  a  very  considerable  variety  of  distinct 
qualities.  We  have,  of  course,  to  begin  with,  the  qualities 
perceived  through  the  senses;  colors,  shapes,  sounds,  tac¬ 
tual  perceptions,  temperature  sensations,  et  cetera.  Be¬ 
sides  that,  when  we  dissect  a  living  being,  we  find  different 
kinds  of  stuff  or  structure,  bones,  nerves,  blood  vessels, 
muscles.  That  is  the  starting  point  of  the  doctrine.  Cor¬ 
responding  to  every  quality  that  we  find,  there  is  an  in¬ 
definite  number  of  minute  parts  or  elements  which  have 
the  same  qualities.  Bone  is  made  up  of  bone  parts,  nerve 
of  nerve  parts,  muscle  of  muscle  parts,  heat  of  heat  parts. 

We  can  smile  at  Anaxagoras  because  he  did  not  have 
behind  him  the  history  of  scientific  analysis,  of  the  minute 
analysis  of  things  by  use  of  the  microscope,  test  tube,  et 
cetera,  which  we  have.  But  Anaxagoras’  doctrine  of  the 
elements  is  the  ancestor  of  the  modern  chemical  doctrine. 
The  chemist,  as  a  chemist,  does  not  say  that  he  can  reduce 
all  the  elements  to  the  same  kind  of  atoms.  The  physicist 
says  that  all  the  chemical  substances  may  be  composed  of 
the  same  primary  stuff,  and  if  he  is  a  metaphysical  physi¬ 
cist,  he  is  now  apt  to  say  that  they  are  constellations  of 
electrons.  But  the  chemist  simply  reduces  the  physical 
world  to  things  that  cannot  be  further  analyzed  by  chem¬ 
ical  methods. 

The  elements  of  Anaxagoras  represent  the  not  further 
analyzable  qualities  of  the  world,  and  he  regards  these 
qualities  as  due  to  the  presence  of  a  large  number  of  minute 
particles  which  have  the  same  qualities.  That  is,  the  sub¬ 
stance  of  things,  and  all  the  ceaseless  variety  of  beings 
which  exist  in  our  world  are  due  to  the  intermixture  and 
separation  of  these  elements. 

As  to  the  cause  of  these  ceaseless  processes  of  intermix¬ 
ture  and  separation,  Anaxagoras  is  quite  original.  He 


66 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


says  that  these  things  cannot  move  of  themselves.  There 
must  be  something  which  moves  them.  He  says  we  know 
that,  when  our  bodies  undergo  a  change,  when  we  move  our 
bodies,  it  is  because  there  is  a  mind  causing  the  body  to 
move.  As  to  the  cause  of  movement,  therefore,  he  argues 
that,  just  as  you  and  I  intentionally  move  our  bodies,  and 
through  moving  our  bodies  move  other  things  to  a  limited 
extent,  so  there  is  a  universal  mind  which  is  the  cause  of 
movement.  He  calls  this  Nous — Universal  Intelligence. 
He  does  not  conceive  this  mind  in  a  strictly  immaterial  way, 
and  he  does  not,  so  far  as  the  preserved  fragments  of  his 
teaching  show,  work  out  the  difficulties  and  problems  of 
how  mind  can  act  on  matter.  He  does  not  even  apply  his 
theory  of  mind  as  the  prime  mover,  except  when  he  can 
find  no  other  explanation.  Mind  imparts  only  the  original 
rotatory  movement  to  things. 

You  may  ask  for  the  difference  between  Anaxagoras’ 
view  and  the  primitive  animistic  view.  We  may  say,  on 
the  one  hand,  that  Anaxagoras  has  a  clearly  defined  doc¬ 
trine  of  material  elements,  and,  on  the  other  hand,  he  con¬ 
ceived  the  universe  as  a  unity,  with  one  universal  mind 
as  the  first  cause  of  all  the  motion  in  the  world.  Neither 
of  these  views,  in  a  clearly  defined  form,  were  present  in 
the  primitive  animistic  view  of  the  world. 

References 

*  Avey,  Albert  E.,  Readings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  III. 

*  Bakewell,  Charles  M.,  Source-Book  in  Ancient  Philosophy 

(well-chosen  selections  from  all  ancient  philosophers). 

*  Benn,  Alfred  W.,  Early  Greek  Philosophy. 

*  Burnet,  John,  Early  Greek  Philosophy,  and  Greek  Philosophy 

from  Thales  to  Plato,  pp.  1-36  and  57-86. 

Cornford,  F.  M.,  From  Religion  to  Philosophy. 

Gomperz,  Th.,  Greek  Thinkers. 

Grote,  G.,  History  of  Greece,  Yol.  VIII. 


THE  DIFFERENTIATION  OF  PHILOSOPHY  67 


*  Rogers,  Arthur  K.,  A  Student’s  History  of  Philosophy, 

pp.  8-48. 

*  Sedgwick  and  Tyler,  A  Short  History  of  Science,  pp.  35-68. 

*  Thilly,  Frank,  History  of  Philosophy,  pp.  7-50. 

*  Windelband,  Wilhelm,  History  of  Ancient  Philosophy,  pp. 

16-151. 

*  Zeller,  Edward,  Outlines  of  Greek  Philosophy,  pp.  35-101. 
Zeller,  Edward,  The  Pre-Socratics. 


CHAPTER  IV 


ATOMISTIC  MATERIALISM 

I.  The  Greek  Atomists 

Leucippus  (dates  unknown,  reputed  teacher  of  Dem¬ 
ocritus)  is  the  originator  of  atomic  materialism.  It  was 
Democritus  (about  460-370  B.  C.)  who  brought  the  theory 
to  the  completeness  given  it  by  the  Greeks.  The  Epi¬ 
curean  School,  one  of  the  most  important  Schools  after 
Aristotle,  adopted  or  affixed  atomic  materialism  to  its 
theory  of  conduct.  One  of  the  chief  causes  of  superstition 
has  been  the  fear  of  the  gods,  but  on  the  basis  of  this 
atomic  theory,  there  is  no  place  for  the  gods ;  and  it  was 
for  this  reason  largely  that  atomism  was  taken  up  by  Epi¬ 
cureans.  The  great  Latin  poet,  Lucretius,  in  his  philo¬ 
sophical  poem,  “On  the  Nature  of  Things,”  also  expounds 
the  philosophical  system  of  atomism. 

The  influence  of  atomism  then  died  out,  and  was  re¬ 
vived  again  when  adopted  by  Gassendi  and  Hobbes.  And 
in  modern  experimental  physical  science  it  has  played  an 
important  part.  The  electron  theory  is  only  the  latest 
development  of  this  atomic  theory.  The  modern  scientific 
atomist  is  not  concerned  about  the  substrata  of  the  mind 
or  the  problems  of  value.  In  physical  science  the  atomic 
theory  is  simply  a  working  hypothesis  that  best  seems  to 
fit  all  the  facts.  It  is  the  best  scientific  policy  there  is. 
To  assume  that  matter  is  discrete  and  not  continuous, 
enables  the  physicist  and  chemist  to  get  forward  in  their 
investigations.  In  Democritus  and  Leucippus,  atomism  is 

68 


ATOMISTIC  MATERIALISM 


69 


a  metaphysical  doctrine.  It  is  put  forth  as  being  ade¬ 
quate  to  explain  the  whole  of  reality.  Leucippus,  who  was 
younger  than  Parmenides  and  older  than  Democritus,  was 
a  contemporary  of  Empedocles  and  Anaxagoras.  Democri¬ 
tus  was  a  contemporary  of  Socrates  and  in  part,  of  Plato. 
We  have  only  a  very  fragmentary  account  of  Democritus. 
Of  him  we  are  told  that  he  had  the  greatest  acquaintance 
with  natural  science  next  to  Aristotle. 

Parmenides  of  Elea  had  taught  that  the  one  substance 
is  unchanged,  eternal,  and  homogeneous.  Heraclitus,  on 
the  other  hand,  taught  that  all  is  change.  The  law  of 
change  alone  is  permanent.  Leucippus  combines  the  ideas 
of  permanence  and  change  in  such  a  way  as  to  admit  both 
without  making  either  illusory. 

The  way  out  of  the  opposition  between  permanence  and 
change,  as  proposed  by  the  atomists,  is  as  follows:  Reality 
consists  of  an  infinite  number  of  mass  particles.  These 
exist  eternally.  They  are  ungenerated.  They  exist  and 
move  in  empty  space.  Atoms  and  the  void  are  the  original 
and  indestructible  data  of  reality.  These  atoms  differ  in 
size,  and  they  differ  to  an  infinite  degree  in  their  forms 
and  shapes.  Some  of  them  have  hooks,  others  have  eyes, 
grooves,  protuberances,  et  cetera.  While  moving  in  space, 
these  atoms  impinge  upon  one  another  and  rebound.  They 
incessantly  move,  and  the  falling  together  of  the  atoms 
produces  a  vortex  movement,  and  it  is  this  movement  that 
gives  rise  to  a  world.  There  is  an  endless  procession  of 
worlds — our  world  is  only  one  of  an  endless  number  of 
worlds  that  arise  and  pass  away.  This  world  of  ours 
swings  in  empty  space  like  a  ball.  On  the  outermost  bounds 
of  the  world  is  a  rind,  as  it  were,  of  closely  packed  atoms. 
From  the  impact  and  rebound  of  atoms  arise  all  things. 
The  four  elements,  of  which  fire  is  the  most  important,  also 
arise  in  this  manner  by  the  intermingling  of  atoms.  Inas¬ 
much  as  the  atoms  have  only  those  qualities  which  we  ap- 


70 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


proximately  call  primary,  that  is,  only  spatial  and  me¬ 
chanical  properties,  size,  shape,  weight,  and  motion,  the 
question  arises,  how  is  it  that  we  come  to  perceive  all  the 
other  qualities  in  the  bodies  such  as  color,  sound,  and  taste ; 
and  how  do  we  know  that  these  qualities  exist  only  for  the 
human  organism?  And  also,  how  do  we  know  that  the 
other  qualities  exist  in  the  objects?  The  reply  to  this 
question  is  given  us  in  the  atomistic  theory  of  knowledge. 

The  soul  consists  of  the  motion — nothing  but  the  motion 
— of  fine,  smooth,  round,  fiery  atoms.  Objects  throw  off 
eidola,  images,  and  these  images  enter  the  sense  organs  and 
then  give  rise  to  the  secondary  qualities.  These  images 
are  not  good  copies  of  the  objects  because  they  are  due  to 
the  meeting  of  the  motions  of  sense  organs  with  the  systems 
of  motion  in  the  form  of  the  images  thrown  off  from  the 
objects.  They  are  distorted,  and  therefore  the  senses  do 
not  acquaint  us  with  the  nature  of  reality.  The  external 
world  has  no  sounds,  no  tastes,  no  odors,  no  colors,  no 
harmony  or  discord,  no  warmth  or  music.  There  is  simply 
everlasting  motion  of  mass  particles  in  space.  The  soul 
itself  consists  of  the  finest  motion  of  the  finest  particles. 
Thus  thought  is  also  regarded  as  being  the  resultant  of  mass 
particles.  It  is  through  thought,  urge  the  atomists,  that 
the  wise  man  knows  that  the  world  consists  only  of  atoms 
moving  in  a  void.  Most  men  know  only  what  is  given  them 
through  the  senses,  but  the  wise  man  through  intuition 
learns  the  truth. 

As  to  the  nature  of  the  Good,  Democritus  assumes  that 
happiness  is  to  be  attained  only  through  the  exercise  of 
thought.  Materialist  though  he  is,  he  is  one  of  the  most 
extreme  rationalists.  Genuine  knowledge  of  the  real  is 
attained  through  the  exercise  of  thought  and  not  through 
the  senses.  In  this  type  of  intuitive  knowledge,  there  is 
a  harmony  of  the  soul,  a  calm,  a  gentle,  harmonious  reac¬ 
tion  of  the  soul  atoms.  In  sense  knowledge,  we  have  those 


ATOMISTIC  MATERIALISM  71 

passions,  those  hurricanes  that  lash  the  soul  and  make  it 
impossible  to  desire  true  knowledge. 

II.  The  Essence  of  Materialism 

Materialism  is  one  of  the  main  types  of  world  view  or 
metaphysics.  The  essence  of  materialism  lies  in  the  fol¬ 
lowing  four  doctrines : 

1.  All  qualitative  varieties  and  changes  in  the  world  of 
human  experiences  are  reducible  to  quantitative  terms  and 
statement. 

2.  All  perceptions,  feelings,  thoughts — the  whole  content 
and  activity  of  mind,  are  reducible  to  the  motions  of  mass 
particles  in  space. 

3.  Because  of  this,  all  so-called  secondary  qualities  of 
objects  are  merely  phenomena  in  the  human  organism — 
these  secondary  qualities  do  not  exist  in  the  objects  them¬ 
selves.  It  is  only  the  primary  qualities  which  really  exist 
apart  from  the  human  percipient  organism. 

4.  Every  event  which  occurs,  every  happening  in  the 
endless  process  of  things,  is  the  result  alone  of  blind  me- 
chanical  motion.  There  is  no  purpose,  no  meaning,  either 
in  the  sum  of  things  or  in  the  elements  of  things.  What 
the  man  in  the  street  calls  purpose  or  providence,  are  illu¬ 
sions  of  his  own  provincial,  self-centered  point  of  view. 
What  really  goes  on  and  really  determines,  with  inexorable 
necessity,  the  sequence  of  events,  is  the  eternal,  unmean¬ 
ing,  unconscious  dance,  the  collision  and  rebound,  of  mass 
particles  in  space.  No  one  guides  the  process  to  an  end, 
and  no  one  controls  it.  Our  desires,  our  intents,  our  pur¬ 
poses,  have  no  more  significance  in  the  blind  and  insensate 
organization  of  the  universe  than  has  the  dancing  of  a 
mote  in  the  sunbeam. 

We  shall  examine  later,  in  Chapter  XVI,  the  modern 
form  of  materialism,  and  the  new  arguments  adduced  for 


72 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


it.  The  reader  is  asked  to  bear  in  mind  that  every  plausible 
form  of  materialism,  including  the  latest  theory  that  the 
human  mind  is  a  by-product  of  a  certain  configuration  of 
electrons  or  electrified  points,  is  a  form  of  atomism.  The 
Greek  atomists  originated  one  of  the  classic  forms  of  philo¬ 
sophical  thought. 

III.  Summary  of  Pre-Socratic  Philosophy 

To  sum  up  the  course  of  pre-Socratic  philosophy,  we 
may  say  that  it  all  centers  in  two  problems — what  are  the 
substances  or  elements  of  which  things  are  made,  and  what 
are  the  causes  of  the  making  and  unmaking  of  things,  that 
is,  of  their  origination  and  decay?  In  short,  Substance 
and  Causality  are  the  two  fundamental  concepts  of  early 
Greek  philosophy . 

For  Thales  and  his  followers  substance  consists  of  a 
homogeneous  stuff  (water,  air)  ;  Heraclitus  has  one  stuff, 
too  (fire)  ;  Empedocles  has  four  (earth,  air,  fire,  and 
water)  ;  Anaxagoras  and  the  Atomists  agree  in  assuming 
an  infinite  number  of  minute  particles,  but,  whereas  the 
particles  of  the  latter  differ  only  in  form  and  mass,  those 
of  Anaxagoras  differ  qualitatively. 

For  Thales  and  his  followers  the  primeval  stuff  is 
dynamic,  that  is,  has  the  power  of  motion  and  life  in  itself. 
Heraclitus  invokes  two  opposing  principles — harmony  and 
strife — to  account  for  the  mutations  of  things.  Empedocles, 
likewise,  has  two  principles  of  motion — love  and  hate. 
Anaxagoras  separates  the  principle  of  motion  from  the 
stuff  moved,  making  the  original  impetus  of  mind  the  cause 
of  all  motion.  Finally,  the  atomic  conception  attempts  a 
thoroughly  mechanistic  explanation  of  change. 

All  of  these  conflicting  theories,  in  more  elaborated  forms, 
have  engaged  man’s  attention  throughout  the  centuries, 
since  the  doctrines  of  one  or  more  natural  substances  and 


ATOMISTIC  MATERIALISM 


73 


causes  are  attempts  to  account  for  the  mutation  and  multi¬ 
plicity  of  things  in  various  ways.  We  have  the  doctrine 
of  the  universal  law  according  to  which  all  changes  take 
place.  We  have  a  doctrine  of  a  multitude  of  elementary 
substances  in  place  of  the  one  homogeneous  substance.  We 
have  various  theories  as  to  the  causes  of  change :  the  love 
and  hate  of  Empedocles,  the  harmony  and  strife  of 
Heraclitus,  and  the  elements  and  Nous  of  Anaxagoras.  We 
have  also  the  very  radical  doctrine  that  the  whole  world 
of  sense  perception  is  an  illusion. 

References 

*  Avey,  Albert  E.,  Headings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  IV. 

*  Bakewell,  Charles  M.,  Source  Book  in  Ancient  Philosophy, 

pp.  57-66. 

*  Burnet,  J.,  Greek  Philosophy,  Part  I,  pp.  94-101,  193-201. 


CHAPTER  V 


SKEPTICISM  AND  SOPHISTRY 

I.  The  Greek  Enlightenment 

The  conflict  of  the  various  theories  outlined  in  the  two 
previous  chapters  brings  into  the  foreground  new  problems 
of  which  man  had  not  hitherto  been  conscious.  The  first 
is  the  problem  of  knowledge.  The  debate  between  the 
representatives  of  these  theories  begets  the  critical  spirit, 
and  man  begins  to  ask  himself,  what  is  the  relation  be¬ 
tween  my  thoughts  and  the  things  I  think  about,  be¬ 
tween  my  senses  and  the  physical  world,  between  my  in¬ 
telligence  and  the  world  ?  The  development  of  the  critical 
spirit  means  further  that  the  spirit  of  inquiry  does  not 
stop  with  theoretical  questions ;  more  particularly,  it  takes 
hold  of  the  questions  of  belief  and  conduct. 

Critical  reflection  on  the  ancestral  mores  and  religion  of 
the  Greeks  resulted  in  the  dissolution  of  the  authority  of 
the  mores  and  traditional  beliefs.  So  the  problem  of  con¬ 
duct  becomes  a  central  problem.  The  critical  spirit  directs 
the  light  of  intelligence  upon  the  inherited  customs  and 
beliefs  in  matters  of  conduct,  statecraft,  and  religion.  So 
we  have  the  nature  and  authority  of  the  good,  the  rules 
of  conduct,  and  the  rites  and  beliefs  of  religion,  becoming 
problems  of  critical  study.  When  man  becomes  conscious 
of  the  fact  that  there  are  problems  of  knowledge,  conduct, 
and  religion,  and  sets  about  to  deal  with  these  problems 
systematically,  then  he  has  become  conscious  of  the  central 
position  which  his  own  mind  occupies  in  relation  to  things. 

74 


SKEPTICISM  AND  SOPHISTRY 


75 


Out  of  these  problems  of  knowledge,  the  good,  and  religion, 
arises  the  consciousness  of  the  problem  of  spirit,  of  the 
meaning  and  nature  of  spirit  or  mind  itself.  All  these 
problems  come  to  a  focus  in  Plato. 

The  work  of  Socrates  and  Plato  was  evoked  by  the  crit¬ 
ical  and  inquiring  spirit  of  their  time.  In  this  they  shared. 
Critical  inquiry  into  the  grounds  of  custom,  usage,  and 
traditional  belief,  the  challenge  that  these  things  validate 
their  authority  before  the  bar  of  reflection,  the  demand  for 
a  rational  foundation  for  law  and  morals — such  was  the 
spirit  of  the  Greek  Enlightenment,  such  is  the  ruling 
spirit  of  every  age  of  enlightenment.  The  distinction  was 
sharply  drawn  between  practices  and  rules  and  beliefs 
which  have  the  sanction  of  convention  alone  and  those 
which,  being  inherent  in  the  nature  of  things ,  have  the 
sanction  of  reason.  The  critical  spirit  may  be  employed 
in  a  chiefly  negative  fashion  and  have  mainly  destructive 
results.  It  mag  destroy  the  old  beliefs  and  undermine  the 
authority  of  the  old  customs ,  laws ,  and  moral  convictions, 
without  putting  any  objectively  determined,  rationally  es¬ 
tablished,  principles  of  conduct  and  thought  in  their 
places.  This  is  precisely  what  teas  happening  in  Athens  in 
the  days  of  Socrates  and  Plato.  The  conflict  of  theories 
and  the  spread  of  the  critical  spirit  was  leading  men  to  the 
view  that  there  was  no  objective  truth  attainable,  and  that 
there  were  no  objective  or  binding  principles  of  social  con¬ 
duct — that  self-interest  is  the  primal  and  only  law  of 
human  association.  Men  rejected  in  toto  the  authority 
of  the  traditional  customs  and  established  laws  and  rules 
of  conduct  of  the  city-state.  They  repudiated  the  im¬ 
memorial  usages,  as  well  as  beliefs,  of  the  ancestral  religion 
of  the  state,  and,  in  so  doing,  they  denied  the  reality  of  any 
other  principle  or  sanction  for  conduct  than  those  of  self- 
interest  and  power,  basing  their  denial  on  the  impossibility 


76 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


of  finding  any  universally  valid  propositions .  The 
Sophists,  who  were  the  popular  teachers  of  the  time  and 
who  instructed  their  fellow-Greeks  in  speechmaking,  legal 
argumentation,  political  debate  and  practice,  as  well  as  in 
the  entire  scientific  and  literary  culture  of  the  age,  are 
represented  by  both  Plato  and  Aristotle  as  having  had, 
on  the  whole,  an  influence  that  made  for  frivolous  skep¬ 
ticism,  the  pretense  of  knowledge  without  the  reality,  and 
the  spread  of  license,  venality,  and  demagoguery. 

The  doctrine  of  Heraclitus,  that  all  things  flow  and  noth¬ 
ing  is  permanent,  was  applied  to  the  problem  of  knowledge 
and  issued  in  the  famous  saying  of  Protagoras:  “Man  is 
the  measure  of  all  things ;  both  of  the  being  of  things,  that 
they  are ;  and  of  the  non-being  of  things,  that  they  are 
not.”  This  saying  was  interpreted  to  mean  that  whatever 
appears  to  the  senses  of  the  individual  to  be  true  or  right 
is  the  only  rule  of  truth  or  right  for  him.  The  source 
of  all  knowledge  is  held  to  be  sense  perception,  and  this 
is  the  result  of  the  meeting  of  movements  without  and 
movements  within  the  sense  organ.  Since  everything  is  in 
perpetual  flux  and  movement,  the  process  of  perception, 
in  which  the  thing  perceived  and  the  process  of  perceiving 
are  identical,  is  always  changing ;  therefore  there  can  be 
no  stable  and  universally  or  objectively  apprehensible  ob¬ 
jects  of  knowledge.  It  may  be  that  Protagoras  did  not 
himself  interpret  his  principle  in  the  completely  relativis¬ 
tic,  individualistic,  and  subjectivistic  fashion  that  involves 
the  denial  of  the  objective  validity  of  any  propositions  in 
social  ethics,  law,  religion,  as  well  as  in  science ;  but  it  is 
evident  that  many  of  his  disciples  did  so  and  with  good 
reason. 

An  even  more  extreme  and  dogmatic  skepticism  was  that 
of  the  sophist  Gorgias,  who  is  reputed  to  have  said:  (1) 
nothing  is;  for  that  which  is  cannot  be  thought,  either  as 


SKEPTICISM  AND  SOPHISTRY 


77 


one  or  many,  imperishable  or  perishable;  (2)  if  anything 
were  it  could  not  be  known,  for  knowing  and  the  object 
known  must  be  different,  otherwise  error  were  impossible, 
but  if  knowing  and  the  object  known  be  different  the  one 
cannot  compass  the  other;  (3)  if  anyone  knew  anything  he 
could  not  communicate  it,  since  communication  requires 
signs,  and  the  signs  and  the  things  signified  are  different. 

It  was  on  account  of  their  pretensions  to  universal  wis¬ 
dom  and  capacity  to  instruct  their  fellows,  coupled  with 
intellectual  frivolity,  demagogical  shallowness  and  inordi¬ 
nate  greed  for  gain  and  renown,  that  Plato  so  mercilessly 
pilloried  the  sophists.  He  probably  did  some  of  them  some 
injustice.  Nevertheless,  it  seems  evident  that,  at  the  time 
when  Plato  became  the  pupil  of  Socrates,  there  was  rife 
among  the  Athenian  intelligentsia  a  spirit  of  skepticism, 
smart,  irreverent,  flippant,  superficial,  and  pretentious, 
which  was  made  the  cover  for  private  license;  and  for 
chicanery,  corruption,  violent  demagoguery,  and  partisan¬ 
ship,  and  ruthless  pursuit  of  self-interest,  in  the  body  poli¬ 
tic.  No  one  can  reflect  on  the  fact  that  the  conviction  of 
Socrates  was  due  to  Athenian  political  intrigue,  or  on  the 
evidence  from  Plato’s  dialogues,  and  avoid  the  conclusion 
that  the  moral  and  social  skepticism  fostered  by  the  Sophists 
fell  in  with  and  reinforced  the  evil  tendencies  of  the  Athe¬ 
nian  democracy.  Both  the  extreme  radicals  and  stand¬ 
patters  of  the  present  hour  would  do  well  to  ponder  a  bit 
on  this  historical  situation.  Socrates  and  Plato  tried  to 
save  Athens.  Both  failed,  and  the  political  life  of  Greece 
soon  became  extinct.  Since  then  she  has  enjoyed  only  the 
vicarious  and  spiritual  immortality  of  her  prophets,  whom 
she  rejected. 

After  the  days  of  Plato  and  Aristotle  skepticism  was 
developed  in  more  systematic  form.  We  will  now  con¬ 
sider  the  arguments  for  it. 


78 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


II.  Skepticism 

Skepticism  literally  means  a  thoughtful  inquiry,  the 
looking  at  a  problem  in  a  disinterested  spirit,  the  survey¬ 
ing  of  a  question  from  many  sides.  In  this  sense  it  is  the 
very  essence  of  philosophy  and  science.  It  has  come  to 
have,  however,  a  new  meaning,  that  is,  it  doubts  the  pos¬ 
sibility  of  knowledge.  Skepticism  may  be  either  partial 
or  complete.  Most  of  the  great  Greek  philosophers,  Plato 
among  them,  denied  that  the  senses  alone  give  us  true 
knowledge.  These  great  thinkers  held  that  we  could  know 
reality  through  reason.  Thus  they  were  rationalists,  not 
skeptics.  In  fact  there  is  scarcely  a  great  philosopher  who 
was  a  thorough  skeptic,  save  David  Hume,  and  even  Hume 
held  that  utter  skepticism  could  not  be  maintained  in  prac¬ 
tical  life. 

Under  the  head  of  complete  skepticism  we  have  what  is 
called  dogmatic  skepticism,  the  denial  of  the  possibility  of 
knowledge.  This  is  often  identified  with  agnosticism. 
(This  term  was  coined  by  Huxley,  and  he  did  not 
mean  dogmatic  skepticism  but  an  attitude  of  ignorance 
in  regard  to  ultimate  problems.)  Critical  skepticism  in¬ 
volves  suspense  of  judgment  on  all  problems.  This  form 
of  skepticism  was  first  formulated  by  Pyrrho,  365-275 
B.  C.,  and  was  further  developed  by  Carneades,  215-130 
B.  C.  Dogmatic  skepticism  is  self-contradictory,  for  to 
say  that  it  is  impossible  to  know  is  to  make  a  dogmatic 
statement  which  claims  to  be  truth.  It  asserts  so  much  as 
to  the  nature  of  mind  and  reality  as  to  negate  its  own  pre¬ 
suppositions.  A  skeptic  of  this  kind  is  an  arrant  dog¬ 
matist.  Pyrrhonic  skepticism  tries  hard  not  to  contra¬ 
dict  itself.  It  is  critical.  Its  standpoint  is  that  we  are 
not  certain  whether  we  know  something  or  whether  we  can 
know  nothing.  Since  we  do  not  know  whether  we  do 
know  nothing  or  something,  the  only  consistent  attitude 


SKEPTICISM  AND  SOPHISTRY 


79 


is  that  in  which  there  is  a  suspension  of  all  judgment.  To 
be  thoroughly  consistent,  the  Pyrrhonic  skeptic  would  have 
to  hold  that  he  was  not  certain  whether  we  ought  to  sus¬ 
pend  judgment.  The  skeptic,  to  be  consistent  in  all  re¬ 
spects,  should  add  that  he  cannot  know  whether  one  ought 
to  say  that  one  ought  to  suspend  judgment,  and  that  one 
cannot  know  whether  one  cannot  know  whether  one  ought 
to  say  that  one  ought  to  suspend  judgment  and  so  on  ad 
infinitum.  Carneades  argues  that  since  certitude  is  im¬ 
possible,  (a  dogmatic  statement!)  then  probability  is  the 
guide  of  life,  and  he  further  holds  that  there  are  degrees 
of  probability : 

1.  The  first  degree  is  plausibility. 

2.  A  proposition  may  be  not  only  plausible  but  also 
not  contradicted  by  other  sensations,  and  thus  has  added 
plausibility. 

3.  A  proposition  thoroughly  consistent  with  other  propo¬ 
sitions  is  still  more  plausible. 

At  this  point  Carneades,  in  making  consistency  his  basis 
or  test  of  judgment,  is  inconsistent  with  his  initial  propo¬ 
sition. 

Practically  all  the  arguments  of  present  skeptics  were 
devised  by  the  Greek '  skeptics.  The  first  and  chief est 
argument  is  the  argument  against  the  trustworthiness  of 
the  senses.  Skeptics  for  the  most  part  presuppose  a  sen¬ 
sationalists  theory  of  knowledge,  and  then,  noting  the 
unreliability  of  the  senses,  they  either  doubt  or  deny  the 
possibility  of  knowledge. 

Zeno,  the  Eleatic,  had  already  developed,  with  great 
acuteness,  arguments  against  the  trustworthiness  of  sense 
perception,  based  on  their  contradictory  deliverances.  But 
Zeno  had  complete  faith  in  the  power  of  reason  to  appre¬ 
hend  reality.  This  faith  is  lacking  in  the  skeptics,  who  trust 
neither  the  senses  nor  reason.  Hence,  the  arguments  of  the 
later  skeptics  are  n,ot  of  the  same  rationalistic  character  as 


80 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


those  of  Zeno  and  his  School.  The  later  arguments  are  of  a 
more  empirical  nature. 

The  first  and  chief  set  of  arguments  for  skepticism  are 
empirical  ones.  They  are  drawn  from  considerations  in¬ 
volved  in  the  limitations  and  variations  of  sense  percep¬ 
tion.  These  arguments  fall  under  four  heads : 

1.  Variations  are  due  to  differences  in  the  organiza¬ 

tion  of  animal  forms.  The  various  species  have  various 
degrees  of  sensitivity  of  sensation.  Even  human  beings 
differ  in  their  sensory  reactions,  some  being  duller  in  one 
sense  and  more  active  in  some  other  sense.  It  is  a  notorious 
fact,  says  the  skeptic,  that  there  is  no  use  in  discussing 
tastes  ;  ‘  ‘  de  gustibus  non  disputandum.  ”  “  One  man ’s 

meat  is  another  man’s  poison.’ ’ 

2.  The  second  body  of  items  in  support  of  skepticism  is 
drawn  from  the  variations  of  an  object’s  appearance  to  the 
different  sense  organs.  An  orange  is  round  and  yellow 
to  the  eye,  it  is  rough  to  the  touch,  sweet  to  the  taste, 
and  to  the  merchant  it  means  a  certain  amount  of  cash. 

3.  The  same  individual’s  organism  varies  from  time  to 
time.  If  one  has  a  bad  cold  in  one’s  head,  then  the  delicate 
flavor  of  food  does  not  exist  for  him;  and  to  one  having 
either  fever  or  chills,  the  temperature  conditions  are  quite 
different  from  w7hat  they  are  to  the  same  individual  in  a 
normal  condition. 

4.  There  are  all  sorts  of  differences  in  men’s  reactions 
to  their  surroundings  which  are  due  to  moral  customs, 
beliefs,  traditions,  prejudices.  The  effects  of  environment 
and  early  habits  largely  determine  what  we  regard  as  right 
or  wrong,  true  or  false,  beautiful  or  ugly.  Our  so-called 
judgments  about  these  types  of  relations  are  largely,  if 
not  entirely,  determined  by  education,  habit,  and  environ¬ 
ment.  A  study  of  the  different  peoples  at  different  levels 
of  social  development  also  indicates  this.  These  four  types 


SKEPTICISM  AND  SOPHISTRY 


81 


of  argument  are  all  based  on  the  relativity  of  the  per¬ 
cipient  organism. 

There  is  still  another  group  of  differences  which  make 
valid  knowledge  impossible.  Here  fall  cases  of  the  rela¬ 
tivity  of  the  objects  themselves.  The  object  depends  for 
its  sensory  qualities  upon  its  relation  to  other  objects.  A 
distant  object  looks  smaller  than  the  same  object  near  by; 
an  object  in  bright  light  has  a  different  color  from  the 
same  object  in  twilight.  This  holds  true  also  of  sounds. 
Qualities  differ  also  according  to  quantities.  A  man,  for 
instance,  may  take  a  little  wine  and  feel  good ;  he  may 
take  more  and  feel  bumptious ;  he  takes  still  more  and  he 
gets  roaring  drunk.  Arsenic  in  its  behavior  also  shows 
pronounced  differences  in  reaction  in  proportion  to  the 
quantity  taken.  Qualities  all  seem  to  vary  with  quantities. 

All  judgments  are  relative.  Thought  cannot  give  us  the 
truth.  Even  in  the  special  sciences,  it  is  seen  that  dem¬ 
onstrations  proceed  from  underlying  assumptions,  and  these 
assumptions,  which  are  the  final  grounds  of  knowledge, 
are  without  proof. 

The  Stoic  philosophers  maintained  that  true  proposi¬ 
tions  are  those  which  are  clear  and  self-evident.  But,  says 
the  skeptic,  clearness  and  self -evidence  is  a  matter  that  is 
wholly  relative  to  the  individual.  What  is  clear  and  self- 
evident  to  one  person,  may  be  the  opposite  of  what  appears 
so  to  another  person.  The  Stoics  formulated  a  second  cri¬ 
terion,  namely,  the  “consensus  gentium.”  This  means  the 
universal  consent  of  mankind  to  a  proposition.  At  this 
point  again  the  skeptic  replies,  there  is  no  such  proposition. 

The  conclusion  of  the  whole  matter  is  this :  The  wise 
man  will  not  be  sure  that  he  can  be  sure  of  anything.  He 
will  guide  his  life  wholly  by  probability.  Like  Cratylus 
and  others,  he  will  not  pass  judgments;  he  will  not  even 
wag  his  thumb. 

I  shall  now  briefly  indicate  the  nature  of  the  reply  to 


82 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


skepticism.  As  to  sense  perception,  it  can  be  said  that  the 
very  fact  that  mind  recognizes  the  inconsistencies  of  dif¬ 
ferent  reactions  of  different  individuals  and  species  is  due 
to  the  ability  of  thought  to  formulate  standards  of  truth. 
Doubt  means  inquiry,  a  thoughtful  turning  over  of  things, 
and  this  in  turn  implies  reference  to  a  standard.  I  cannot 
doubt  the  deliverances  of  sense  unless  I  already  have  a 
standard.  In  physics  we  have  our  standard  thermometer 
and  our  standards  of  weight  and  measure.  In  all  our  ex¬ 
perimental  investigations  care  is  taken  to  have  the  standard 
constant  and  to  eliminate  all  disturbing  conditions.  In 
science  the  statistical  method  has  for  its  chief  function  the 
reduction  of  error  to  a  minimum.  As  to  thought,  it  must 
be  admitted  that  knowledge  does  ultimately  rest  on  assump¬ 
tions.  We  do  assume  the  validity  of  certain  basic  principles. 
The  three  laws  of  thought  are  illustrative  of  this,  and  in 
our  empirical  investigations  we  assume  the  uniformity  of 
nature.  Having  made  these  the  most  universal  and  most 
fundamental  working  hypotheses,  we  then  proceed  to  learn 
to  control  nature. 

The  ultimate  standard  of  truth  is  not  a  judgment  of  all 
mankind, — “tot  homines,  tot  sententias, ’ ’  so  many  men, 
so  many  opinions.  There  are  all  kinds  of  human  thinkers, 
good,  poor,  and  indifferent.  Truth  in  science  is  not  deter¬ 
mined  by  counting  heads  or  noses.  Many  heads  have  very 
little  in  them.  Even  in  social  and  political  matters,  the 
majority  is  not  always  right.  But  there  is,  however,  a 
criterion  or  standard.  True  propositions  are  those  that 
are  consistent  with  one  another  and  with  the  further  inter¬ 
pretation  of  experience. 


References 

*  Avey,  Albert  E.,  Readings  in  Philosophy ,  Chapter  Y. 

*  Burnet,  J.,  Greek  Philosophy,  Part  I,  pp.  105-125. 


SKEPTICISM  AND  SOPHISTRY  83 

*  Encyclopedia  Britannica ,  11th  ed.,  Articles  Sophists  and  Skep¬ 

tics. 

*  MacColl,  H.,  The  Greek  Skeptics. 

Patrick,  Mary  Mills,  Sextus  Empiricus. 

*  Rogers,  Arthur  K.,  A  Student’s  History  of  Philosophy,  pp. 

37-39  and  160-165. 

*  Thilly,  Frank,  History  of  Philosophy,  pp.  40-49  and  116-120. 

*  Windelband,  W.,  History  of  Ancient  Philosophy,  pp.  100-123 

and  329-336. 

*  Zeller,  Edward,  Greek  Philosophy ,  pp.  268-273. 

Zeller,  Edward,  Stoics,  Epicureans  and  Skeptics. 


CHAPTER  VI 


THE  PERSONALITY,  MISSION,  AND  INFLUENCE  OF  SOCRATES 

I.  The  Personality  of  Socrates 

It  is  impossible  to  separate  the  teaching  of  Socrates  from 
that  of  Plato.  Plato  makes  Socrates  his  mouthpiece.  It  is 
a  difficult  and  perhaps  insoluble  problem  as  to  where  to 
draw  the  line  of  separation  between  their  doctrines. 

Xenophon,  who  wrote,  in  his  Memorabilia  of  his  revered 
master,  an  account  of  the  personality  and  teaching  of  Soc¬ 
rates,  was  an  upright  soldier,  but  was  incapable  of  con¬ 
veying  an  adequate  account  of  the  philosophical  teachings 
of  Socrates.  He  conveys  only  the  reverence  of  an  honest 
soldier  for  the  greatest  man  he  ever  knew.  In  Aristotle 
also,  we  have  some  condensed  information  as  to  Socrates. 
Here  we  are  told  that  Socrates  was  the  first  philosopher  to 
develop  deduction  and  induction  as  a  means  of  definition; 
and  further,  that  he  was  the  first  to  develop  the  process  of 
division  or  classification  of  concepts. 

Socrates  was  in  469  B.  C.,  at  a  time  when  Athens 
was  passing  through  the  most  brilliant  period  of  her  history. 
From  479  to  431  Athens  was  the  most  brilliant  of  all  city 
states.  Socrates  died  in  399  B.  C.  by  drinking  hemlock 
poison  in  fulfillment  of  the  sentence  of  death  imposed  upon 
him  by  the  Athenian  jury. 

Athens  had  entered  upon  the  greatest  period  of  her  his¬ 
tory,  upon  her  age  of  supreme  sacrifice  and  effort;  and 
it  was  in  just  such  an  age  that  she  developed  her  greatest 
glory.  (The  age  of  Shakespeare,  and  the  present  situation 

84 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF  SOCRATES 


85 


in  America  afford  epochs  that  are  quite  similar  to  this.) 
Socrates’  work  was  carried  on  (as  he  prophesied  it  would 
be)  by  Plato,  the  greatest  of  all  prose  writers.  He  in  turn 
was  followed  by  Aristotle,  “the  master  of  those  who  know.” 

The  age  of  Socrates  was  one  of  enlightenment,  criticism, 
an  age  of  keen  intellectual  activity.  This  is  evidenced  by 
the  great  activity  of  the  Sophists.  This  age  of  inquiry  and 
criticism  was  succeeded  by  an  age  of  creativeness.  Athens 
was  not  only  the  center  of  Greek  political  life ;  it  was 
also  an  intellectual  center.  This  age  in  Athens  was,  in 
view  of  its  brevity  and  the  comparatively  small  size  of  the 
Athenian  state,  the  greatest  intellectual  period  in  the  his¬ 
tory  of  the  world. 

The  Sophists,  or  “wise  men,”  sarcastically  so-called  by 
Plato  who  did  not  like  them,  are  contrasted  with  the  phi¬ 
losophers  as  lovers  of  wisdom,  who  do  not  pretend  to  be 
wise.  The  Sophists  arose  in  response  to  a  definite  social 
situation.  They  were  professional  teachers  in  a  time  when 
there  were  no  colleges  and  universities.  Plato’s  Academy 
was  founded  and  directed  by  Plato,  and  it  is  here  that  we 
first  find  the  true  features  of  a  university,  namely : 

1.  Research  into  all  fields  of  knowledge 

2.  The  training  of  men  for  public  service 

Plato  carried  on  his  work  in  the  belief  that  the  state  could 
not  prosper  without  using  the  best  trained  men  that  were 
available.  This  was  the  high  standard  of  Plato’s  academy. 
As  contrasted  with  this,  in  our  state  life,  men  of  the  highest 
training  are  often  not  wanted  in  public  life. 

The  spirit  of  critical  inquiry  was  rife  in  Athens  as  it  was 
in  France  before  the  French  Revolution,  and  as  it  is  in 
America  to-day.  It  was  an  inevitable  consequence  that,  in 
such  a  situation,  hoary  customs  and  time-honored  traditions 
and  beliefs  would  be  called  into  question.  Students  in  the 
colleges  and  universities  of  America  to-day,  coming  into 
touch  with  the  sciences  and  philosophy,  may  be  similarly 


86 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


disturbed  in  their  views.  But  this  questioning  attitude 
must  be  aroused  if  there  is  to  be  personal  development  and 
progress.  The  same  is  true  in  the  life  of  a  state.  Traditions 
and  customs  must  be  critically  analyzed  and  subjected  to 
rational  treatment. 

The  Sophists  made  many  claims,  one  being  that  they  were 
able  to  make  the  worse  cause  appear  the  better.  Some  of 
them,  notably  Protagoras,  held  the  view  that  man  is  the 
measure  of  all  things.  There  are,  indeed,  two  ways  of 
taking  this  attitude  of  the  Sophists :  First,  the  individual 
with  all  his  limitations,  that  is,  the  particular,  changeable 
individual,  may  be  taken  as  the  measure  of  all  things ;  sec¬ 
ond,  human  nature  in  general,  that  is,  the  immutable  and 
necessary  rational  and  moral  element  common  to  all  man¬ 
kind,  may  be  taken  as  the  measure  of  all  things.  If  the 
first  view  be  accepted,  then  there  is  nothing  objective  in  our 
moral  distinctions  and  rules  for  conduct,  and  it  may  even 
seem  that  there  are  no  means  by  which  objective  truth  and 
good  can  be  ascertained.  It  was  in  this  attitude  that  some 
of  the  Sophists  pandered  to  the  gilded  youth  of  their  day 
and  taught  them  that  whatever  one  may  want  to  do  is 
right.  Conservatism  took  alarm  at  this  teaching.  The 
standpatters  of  the  day  maintained  that  Athens  was  going 
to  ruin,  and  that  all  civic  foundations  were  being  under¬ 
mined.1  The  solution  offered  by  the  standpatters  of  the 
day  was  that  this  procedure  must  be  stamped  out  and  that 
the  customs  of  the  city  state  must  be  blindly  and  unques¬ 
tionably  accepted  and  obeyed.  “The  old  is  the  best,”  this 
is  the  constant  attitude  of  the  standpatter. 

Socrates  saw  the  danger  that  would  result  to  the  indi¬ 
vidual  and  to  the  state  from  both  of  these  attitudes.  He 
sought  to  use  rhetoric  and  argumentation  for  other  purposes 
than  to  justify  the  momentary  whims  and  opinions  of  the 


1  See  the  plays  of  Aristophanes. 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF  SOCRATES 


87 


individual.  While  men  were  openly  preaching  that  “  might 
is  right”  and  declaring  that  the  only  test  of  conduct  is 
‘‘does  it  pay  in  financial  or  political  success,”  Socrates  saw 
another  way  out  of  the  dangers  of  the  situation,  namely, 
not  by  cessation  of  thought,  not  by  a  dumb  and  blind 
adherence  to  tradition,  but  through  earnest  and  persistent 
thoughtfulness.  The  way  of  reason  was  the  only  way  out 
for  Socrates.  The  cure  for  the  ills  of  the  day  as  proposed 
by  Socrates  was  not  the  suspension  of  reason,  but  the  sys¬ 
tematic,  persistent  exercise  of  reason. 

Socrates  felt  that  the  Sophists  were  not  in  earnest  and 
not  intellectually  equipped  for  the  work  to  which  they  set 
themselves.  He  looked  upon  them  as  pretenders,  fakers, 
(a  goodly  number  of  such  Sophists  are  at  large  in  our  coun¬ 
try  to-day),  men  who  said  one  thing  to  one  crowd  and 
something  else  to  another  crowd.  Their  own  interest  was 
their  constant  aim.  The  trouble  with  Athens,  Socrates 
saw,  was  that  the  leaders  had  not  made  a  deep  inquiry 
into  the  principles  of  conduct  and  the  social  order.  The 
way  of  salvation  for  the  state  and  the  individual,  Socrates 
said,  is  to  think  out  earnestly  the  problems  of  conduct.  It 
was  the  problem  of  conduct,  and  not  the  problems  of  the 
early  cosmologists,  that  engaged  Socrates’  attention.  He 
cared  only  for  social  and  ethical  inquiries. 

Socrates  was  a  man  of  powerful  frame  and  of  great  en¬ 
durance.  He  was  abstemious  in  his  habits,  but  not  ascetic, 
and  was  not  given  to  eating  or  drinking  to  excess,  even 
though  his  companions  all  did  so.  He  was  kindly  and 
good-humored,  but  unflinching  in  his  devotion  to  the  right, 
noble  and  magnanimous  in  temper.  He  devoted  himself 
whole-heartedly  to  his  mission,  and  carefully  avoided  mix¬ 
ing  in  politics,  believing  that  if  he  did  his  life  would  be 
shortened.  Three  times  he  had  the  deciding  vote  on  public 
questions,  and  at  these  times  he  braved  the  clamor  of  the 
multitude  and  the  voice  of  authority.  He  faced  death 


88 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


without  a  tremor.  His  passions  and  his  body  were  the 
complete  servants  of  his  rational  will.  He  always  regarded 
himself  as  entrusted  with  a  mission  from  on  high  and  as 
being  always  under  divine  guidance.  He  repeatedly  spoke 
of  his  daemon  or  spirit,  the  supernatural,  inner  voice,  which 
gave  him  warning  at  all  the  crises  of  life. 

Socrates  was  accused  of  the  following  three  charges: 

1.  Corrupting  the  youth 

2.  Teaching  atheism 

3.  Introducing  false  divinities 

The  real  causes  of  the  accusation,  however  were: 

1.  Desire  for  revenge  on  the  part  of  the  exposed  humbugs 
of  the  day 

2.  The  democratic  reaction  against  the  tyrants  with  some 
of  whom  Socrates  had  been  closely  associated,  notably  Al- 
cibiades 

Socrates,  of  all  those  in  Athens  interested  in  the  problem 
of  knowledge,  knew  that  he  was  ignorant.  The  first  step  in 
the  acquisition  of  true  knowledge  is  the  consciousness  of 
ignorance. 

II.  The  Method  of  Socrates 

Socrates’  method  was  directed  towards  elucidating  or 
educing  from  the  ordinary  opinions  of  men  in  regard  to 
virtue,  the  good,  temperance,  justice,  et  cetera,  consistent 
and  adequate  conceptions.  He  believed  that  there  is  latent 
or  implicit  in  moral  common  sense  (in  the  opinion  of  the 
average  decent  citizen)  sound  conceptions  in  regard  to  con¬ 
duct,  but  that  these  conceptions  are  implicit,  that  is,  not 
yet  thought  about.  The  ordinary  man  dealt  with  particu¬ 
lar  cases  as  they  arose  and  had  not  thought  things  out. 
Socrates  refers  to  his  art  as  that  of  an  intellectual  midwife. 
He  helped  men  bring  forth  conceptions  that  were  latent 
or  implicit  in  their  ordinary  opinions. 

The  following  will  illustrate  his  method  of  procedure: 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF  SOCRATES 


89 


Suppose  the  question  to  be,  “What  is  justice?”  The 
ready  answer  came :  “  J ustice  is  an  eye  for  an  eye,  a 

tooth  for  a  tooth,  good  for  good,  and  evil  for  evil.” 
Socrates  would  ask :  “Is  the  man  who  returns  good  for 
evil  an  unjust  man?”  His  answer  was:  “No;  one  sees 
that  such  a  man  is  just  in  a  much  higher  degree.”  Thus 
by  questions  and  answers  he  sought  to  elucidate  universal 
ideas,  aiming  to  get  definitions  that  were  applicable  to 
every  concrete  case. 

Instead  of  the  current  sophistical  view  that  the  thing 
to  do  is  simply  to  do  what  you  feel  like  doing,  Socrates 
maintained  that  we  must  reflect,  think,  and  form  rational 
notions  of  conduct.  We  must  carry  rational  thinking 
through  to  the  bitter  end.  In  doing  this  Socrates  took 
the  definitions  given  off  the  bat,  as  it  were,  by  those 
who  knew  (thought  they  knew),  and  showed  that  such 
definitions  did  not  square  with  the  moral  common  sense  of 
man.  Socrates  took  a  definition,  set  it  up  as  an  hypoth¬ 
esis,  and  then  examined  it  to  see  if  it  stood  the  test  at 
the  hands  of  particular  cases.  He  reflected  upon  facts 
and  the  foundations  of  hypotheses,  and  sought  to  test 
them  by  concrete  cases.  Such  was  the  nature  of  the 
Socratic  method. 

III.  The  Substance  of  Socrates’  Teaching 

The  substance  of  Socrates’  teaching  may  be  expressed 
thus:  “Virtue  is  knowledge;  vice  is  ignorance.  No  man 
willingly  does  evil ;  every  man  seeks  the  good.  ’  ’  This  seems 
to  be  an  extraordinary  statement.  Offhand  we  would  say 
it  is  false.  “I  see  and  approve  the  better,  but  I  do  the 
worse”;  this  statement  we  would  approve.  There  is  a 
wide  gap,  we  think,  between  knowing  and  doing.  We 
ordinarily  believe  we  know  what  is  right.  We  often  say, 
“where  ignorance  is  bliss,  ’tis  folly  to  be  wise.”  We  often 


90 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


think  that  knowledge  produces  corruption,  and  that  it  is 
wrong  to  think  upon  certain  sacred  matters  and  other  mat¬ 
ters  that  are  evil.  Socrates  held  that  there  could  be  no 
permanently  good  and  useful  conduct  that  is  not  guided 
by  sustained  thoughtfulness  and  that  knowledge  earnestly 
sought  and  used  would  never  lead  to  evil. 

If  Socrates  were  here  to-day,  he  would  doubtless  say 
that  much  of  what  we  call  knowledge  he  would  call  de¬ 
graded  knowledge,  or  even  not  knowledge  at  all.  Our 
handing  out  of  cold  storage  pabulum  to  blindly  accepting 
pupils  is  not  the  true  way  of  imparting  and  acquiring 
knowledge.  Knowledge  for  Socrates  was  personal  insight 
which  men  acquire  by  their  own  persistent  activity.  No 
one  has  any  genuine  knowdedge  which  he  has  not  discov¬ 
ered  for  himself.  We  find  no  peptonized,  predigested,  after¬ 
breakfast  knowledge-tablets  in  Socrates.  Belief  must  cost 
the  sweat  of  the  intellectual  brow,  or  it  is  not  knowledge.  It 
was  knowing  that  had  reference  to  conduct  that  chiefly 
interested  Socrates.  If  one  persistently  endeavors  to  find 
out  what  is  right  or  wrong,  one  will  do  so,  for  he  has  put 
his  whole  personality  into  the  quest.  Knowledge  that  has 
to  do  with  conduct  is  only  attainable  through  an  active 
quest ;  it  is  the  result  of  a  voyage  of  self-discovery.  This 
voyage  of  self-discovery  must  be  made  by  each  individual 
for  himself.  Only  such  knowledge  is  knowledge  at  all  in 
Socrates  ’  view. 

In  literature  we  have  some  magnificent  presentations  of 
persons  like  Milton’s  Satan,  who  knew  the  difference  be¬ 
tween  good  and  evil  and  deliberately  chose  the  evil.  Satan 
says :  ‘  ‘  Evil,  be  thou  my  good.  ’  ’  Such  an  attitude  Socrates 
would  regard  as  impossible.  He  would  say  that  Satan  must 
have  mistakenly  regarded  riding  at  any  cost  as  the  highest 
good.  In  short,  Satan’s  choice  Socrates  would  regard  as 
based  on  a  lack  of  true  insight  into  the  good.  And  indeed, 
the  prevalent  notion  is  that  goodness  requires  little  or  no 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF  SOCRATES 


91 


reflection.  This  is  the  very  opposite  of  Socrates’  view. 
This  view  is  only  the  exaggeration  of  a  great  truth.  Endur¬ 
ing  good  must  be  built  on  knowledge.  There  has  been  more 
evil  wrought  in  this  world  by  ignorant  fanatics  than  by 
all  the  wise  devils.  This  conception  is  strictly  in  line  with 
Socrates’  teaching.  There  is  urgent  necessity  for  the  ap¬ 
plication  of  knowledge  to  the  conduct  of  daily  life,  and 
it  is  the  little  attention  that  has  been  paid  to  the  theoretical 
problems  of  conduct  and  social  organization  that  is  perhaps 
responsible  for  our  present  international  situation.  This 
generation  needs  to  be  reminded  that  Socrates  has  lived. 
We  are  puffed  up  with  knowledge  about  everything,  but 
we  have  gained  but  little  knowledge  about  the  social  and 
political  conditions  of  good  conduct,  and  as  a  consequence 
of  this  we  have  been  lately  using  knowledge  in  that  most 
stupid  business  of  blowing  each  other  to  pieces.  By  our 
industrial  processes  we  have  increased  a  thousandfold  pro¬ 
ductivity  in  material  things,  but  we  have  not  learned  how 
to  distribute  these  goods  equitably  so  as  to  increase  the 
common  weal. 

Socrates’  conception  of  goodness  was  this:  Goodness 
consists  in  the  health  or  harmony  of  the  soul ;  it  is  the 
subordination  and  organization  of  the  appetites  and  im¬ 
pulses  under  the  guidance  of  reason  and  the  good.  This, 
said  Socrates,  is  the  truly  useful.  There  is  nothing  of  use 
that  is  comparable  to  the  welfare  of  the  soul. 

There  is  a  view  current  that  philosophy  is  useless,  since 
it  does  not  tell  us  how  to  pile  up  riches,  win  law  cases, 
achieve  political  preferment,  and  operate  machines.  Socra¬ 
tes  would  doubtless  ask  us  to-day :  “Of  what  use  are  your 
machines,  your  vast  riches,  your  thousands  of  pairs  of  shoes 
made  over  a  similar  pattern,  your  fast  trains,  your  tele¬ 
graph  lines,  your  telephones,  and  motors?”  We  might 
reply :  ‘  ‘  See  how  luxuriously  we  live,  how  sumptuously  we 
fare,  how  fast  we  ride,  and  how  readily  we  communicate 


92 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


with  each  other!”  But  Socrates  would  reply:  “Does  all 
this  contribute  to  the  health  and  harmony  of  the  individual  ? 
Does  it  add  to  the  poise  and  harmony  of  the  people?”  The 
health  and  harmony  of  the  soul  are  the  only  ends  that  are 
supremely  worth  seeking,  and  thus  the  good  alone  is  truly 
useful. 

In  matters  of  religion  Socrates  never  spoke  disrespect¬ 
fully  or  lightly  of  the  finer  aspects  of  the  traditional  forms 
of  Greek  religious  life.  Evidently  his  own  belief  was  that 
there  is  but  one  divine  being  or  principle,  the  guardian  of 
righteousness,  the  moral  governor  of  the  universe. 
The  deepest  article  in  his  own  faith  was  this,  “No  evil  can 
happen  to  a  good  man  either  in  this  life  or  in  any  to  come.” 
A  supreme  righteous  order  rules  in  the  universe,  and  ulti¬ 
mately  no  harm  can  happen  to  a  good  man.  It  is,  indeed, 
far  better  to  suffer  than  to  do  an  injustice.  To  return  evil 
for  evil  is  to  injure  one’s  own  self.  Such  were  the  moral 
intuitions  of  Socrates.  Coupled  with  these  he  had  also  a 
strong  hope  of  immortality. 


References 

Aristotle,  Metaphysics  (I,  6;  XIII,  4),  translated  by  W.  D. 
Ross. 

*  Avey,  Albert  I].,  Headings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  VI. 

Benn,  Alfred  W.,  The  Greek  Philosophers. 

Burnet,  John,  Greek  Philosophy,  Part  I,  pp.  126-192. 

*  Cross,  R.  Nicol,  Socrates,  The  Man  and  His  Mission. 

*  Encyclopcedia  Britannica,  11th  ed.,  Article  “Socrates.” 
Gomperz,  Theodor,  Greek  Thinkers,  Vol.  I. 

Grote,  George,  History  of  Greece,  Vol.  VII. 

*  Plato’s  Dialogues,  translation  by  Jowett;  especially  “Char- 

mides,”  “Crito,”  “Euthyphro,”  “Gorgias,”  “Meno,”  “Pro¬ 
tagoras,”  “Apology,”  “Phsedo,”  “Symposium,”  “Phaedrus.” 

*  Thilly,  Frank,  History  of  Philosophy,  pp.  50-58. 

*  Xenophon,  Memorabilia. 

*  Zeller,  Edward,  Outlines  of  Greek  Philosophy,  pp.  103-118. 
Zeller,  Edward,  Socrates  and  the  Socratic  Schools. 


CHAPTER  VII 


plato  (427-347  b.  c.) 

Plato  extends  the  Socratic  method  of  inquiry  to  other 
spheres,  such  as  mathematics  and  the  physical  sciences. 
There  were  four  great  problems  which  Plato  attempted  to 
solve,  namely : 

1.  The  problem  of  truth  and  of  knowledge  (Logic  and 
Epistemology). 

2.  The  problem  of  the  nature  of  ultimate  reality  (Meta¬ 
physics  and  Philosophy  of  Religion). 

3.  The  problem  of  the  soul.  This  is  the  problem  of  philo¬ 
sophical  psychology. 

4.  The  problem  of  values,  that  is,  what  is  the  good  for 
men  in  society,  and  by  what  kind  of  conduct  and  social 
organization  can  the  good  be  attained?  (Ethics  and  Poli¬ 
tics.) 

I.  The  Problem  of  Truth  and  Knowledge  (Logic) 

In  the  skeptical  theory  of  the  Sophists,  knowledge  was 
derived  from  sense  perception.  Truth  is  therefore  simply 
what  you  taste,  touch,  smell,  feel,  see.  This  theory  Plato 
criticized.  If  this  is  the  nature  of  truth,  he  argues,  then 
there  is  no  truth.  The  pig  or  dog-faced  baboon  is  a 
measure  of  truth  equally  with  the  wisest  man.  Indeed 
“ wisest”  has  then  no  meaning.  This  view  denies  that 
there  is  any  test  or  standard  of  truth.  Thus  these  skep¬ 
tics,  by  saying  that  there  are  no  standards  of  truth,  re¬ 
fute  themselves.  If  there  is  no  truth  this  statement  itself 
is  not  true. 


93 


94 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


Plato  does  not  deny  that  sensation  is  a  factor  in  our 
knowing.  Sensations  furnish  the  stimuli  by  which  we  are 
led  to  think.  True  knowledge,  however,  is  the  soul’s  con¬ 
versation  with  itself.  By  this  Plato  meant  that  knowl¬ 
edge  is  arrived  at  through  the  activity  of  reason  or  of 
thought,  and  not  through  the  senses  alone.  The  senses 
furnish  the  stimuli  and  the  material  for  knowledge,  but 
this  material  must  be  reflected  upon  before  we  can  have 
knowledge. 

Plato  insisted  that  knowledge  is  reminiscence.  Inas¬ 
much  as  we  are  unable  to  account  for  knowledge  in  terms 
of  the  senses  and  inasmuch  as  we  have  knowledge,  the 
soul  must  have  been  born  with  an  inherent  capacity  for 
it,  and  only  gradually  does  the  soul  awaken  to  a  con¬ 
sciousness  of  the  knowledge  that  is  implicit  in  its  own 
being.  Plato  is  here  formulating  the  view  that  true  think¬ 
ing  is  not  something  derived  from,  but  applied  to,  sense 
perception.  True  knowledge  is  not  to  be  explained  as  the 
result  of  sensation  or  sense  perception.  We  do  not  appre¬ 
hend  the  contents  of  true  knowledge  through  the  senses 
alone ;  there  must  therefore  be  an  inborn  capacity  in  the 
soul  which  comes  to  consciousness  through  the  stimula¬ 
tion  of  sense  perception.  Sense  perception  is  merely  the 
occasion  for  getting  knowledge,  but  there  is  no  possibility 
of  deriving  knowledge  from  the  qualities  of  sense  per¬ 
ception  alone.  This  position  of  Plato  is  expressed  in 
Wordsworth’s  “Ode  on  The  Intimations  of  Immortality” 
when  he  says : 

The  Soul  that  rises  with  us,  our  life’s  Star, 

Hath  had  elsewhere  its  setting, 

And  cometh  from  afar: 

Not  in  entire  forgetfulness, 

And  not  in  utter  nakedness, 

But  trailing  clouds  of  glory  do  we  come 
From  God,  who  is  our  home. 


PLATO 


95 


What  Plato  means  by  the  doctrine  that  all  true  knowl¬ 
edge  is  recollection,  is  probably  that  genuine  knowledge, 
which  a  man  really  gains  and  possesses,  is  the  result  always 
of  his  own  intellectual  self-activity.  It  is  not  put  into  the 
mind  from  without,  but  is  evoked  or  educed  by  external 
stimulation,  which  stirs  the  mind  to  self -activity.  Thus, 
knowledge  is  the  result  only  of  the  sustained  energy  of 
the  mind  itself,  which  is  incited  or  occasioned,  but  never 
produced,  by  the  influence  of  a  teacher  or  a  sensory 
experience. 

Consider  some  of  the  kinds  of  knowledge  that  Plato 
has  in  mind.  Knowledge  of  relationships  is  one  kind  or 
type.  Relationships  are  not  proved  through  the  senses. 
Suppose  that  we  deal  with  the  properties  of  a  triangle.  We 
say  that  the  three  interior  angles  are  equal  to  180  degrees. 
Draw  as  many  triangles  as  one  chooses;  they  all  differ  in 
size,  shape,  et  cetera,  and  of  them  all  we  say  that  the  three 
interior  angles  of  any  triangle  equal  180  degrees.  But  it 
is  not  true  of  these  particular  triangles  as  we  measure 
them,  for  we  cannot  measure  them  absolutely.  All  actually 
figured  triangles  are  more  or  less  than  we  define  them  to 
be.  We  cannot  draw  a  line  having  no  breadth.  Thus  all 
the  way  through  the  complete  body  of  mathematical  rela¬ 
tions  there  is  something  absolute  about  these  relations  that 
is  not  perceived  by  the  senses. 

Note  briefly  the  relations :  equals,  greater  than,  and  less 
than.  Suppose  I  say  that  John  Smith  equals  in  height 
John  Brown.  He  may  also  be  shorter  than  X  and  taller 
than  Y.  Therefore  John  Brown  is  at  the  same  time  equal 
to,  shorter  than,  and  taller  than.  Columbus  is  north  of 
Circleville  and  south  of  Delaware.  Columbus  is  also 
east  of  Dayton  and  west  of  Zanesville.  Columbus  is  there¬ 
fore  both  north,  south,  east,  and  west.  We  do  not  apprehend 
the  relation  of  direction  through  perception  alone.  We  do 
not  perceive  north  and  south.  We  cannot  say  where  north 


96 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


begins  and  south  ends.  It  is  only  by  thought  that  these 
relations  are  apprehended. 

In  knowledge  we  further  classify  data.  There  is  no 
knowledge  without  the  systematic  ordering  of  things  we 
have  knowledge  about.  We  order  things  in  groups,  series, 
classes.  I  refer  to  Teddy,  my  dog.  There  are  dogs  and 
men  with  this  name.  What  do  I  mean  by  dog,  man,  bear? 
By  man  I  mean  a  specific  type  of  being  who  belongs  to  a 
certain  class  distinct  from  dogs,  and  that  this  class  is  dis¬ 
tinguished  by  certain  characteristics.  The  empiricist 
claims  that  we  perceive  or  “ sense”  those  characteristics. 
Suppose  that  we  had  seen  a  bear  that  walked  like  a  man ; 
would  it  be  necessary  to  interpret  and  to  classify  that  bear 
as  a  man?  There  must  be  a  body  of  typical  ways  of  be¬ 
havior  present  before  we  classify  the  object  as  a  man. 
As  every  triangle  is  a  particular  case  of  triangularity,  so 
every  man  is  a  particular  case  of  humanity.  He  shares 
in  the  attributes  of  humanity  which  make  him  such.  No 
single  man,  however,  embodies  absolutely  the  attributes 
of  humanity.  Each  individual  is  only  a  partial  embodi¬ 
ment  of  these  attributes,  and  as  this  is  the  case  we  do 
not  perceive  the  attributes  of  humanity  by  the  senses. 
We  perceive  through  the  senses  only  the  particular  indi¬ 
viduals,  and  no  individual  incorporates  all  the  attributes 
of  a  class ;  no  individual  is  the  universal  man.  No  man 
is  humanity ;  no  dog  is  caninity ;  no  horse  is  equinity. 
One  perceives  this  man,  this  dog,  this  horse,  and  that 
exhausts  the  range  of  perception. 

Justice,  injustice,  temperance,  and  intemperance — what 
about  these  moral  attributes?  We  never  say  of  any  par¬ 
ticular  act  that  it  is  the  complete  embodiment  of  self- 
control.  We  never  think  that  any  act  embodies  all  of 
justice.  Each  act  is  an  embodiment  of  some  universal 
quality  or  qualities.  Every  one  of  our  experiences  implies 
that  there  is  a  universal,  and  the  universal  is  thought,  not 


PLATO 


97 


perceived,  apprehended  by  the  reason,  and  not  through 
the  senses.  Mathematical  relations,  logical  relations,  class 
terms  or  class  concepts,  such  as  humanity,  caninity,  ideas 
of  value  (good,  evil,  beautiful)  ;  these  are  universals  known 
only  through  the  intellect,  and  only  through  these  is  knowl¬ 
edge  possible.  Without  reasoning  there  would  be  only 
a  disconnected  riot,  no  sequence  of  perceptions.  That  is 
what  our  experience  would  be  without  thought.  But  the 
fact  that  our  experience  is  not  such  a  riot,  the  fact  that 
we  order  and  classify  and  serialize  all  the  facts  of  nature 
and  the  moral  life,  implies  that  the  soul  is  born  with  the 
capacity  to  think  universals. 

The  main  types  of  these  universals  are : 

1.  Relationships 

2.  Class  concepts 

3.  Values 

What  we  grasp  with  our  senses  alone  is  without  thought. 
Sense  material  is  mutable,  it  ever  fluctuates.  Long  since, 
Heraclitus  said  that  the  world  is  in  constant  flux.  These 
universals,  however,  are  not  in  the  flux,  they  are  changeless 
and  eternal.  The  propositions  of  geometry  are  eternally 
true;  they  do  not  depend  upon  someone  seeing  or  smelling 
them.  And  we  indicate  this  fact  by  saying  that  truth  is 
discovered  and  not  made  or  invented.  The  same  considera¬ 
tion  is  true  in  regard  to  all  relationships.  Relationships 
never  fluctuate.  Equality  remains  equality,  no  matter  what 
the  empirical  condition  of  any  particular  object  may  be. 
The  relationship  “greater  than”  is  always  “greater  than.” 
Particular  things  become  equal  to,  greater  than,  less  than 
other  particular  things,  but  universals  remain  eternally  the 
same.  The  fact  that  we  judge  acts  as  just  and  unjust 
means  that  there  is  a  universal,  unchanging  justice.  There 
is  a  universal  of  temperance  or  self-control.  There  is  also 
a  universal  of  beauty.  Men  may  come  and  men  may 


98 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


go  but  ‘'humanity”  remains  forever  the  same.  The  type 
remains  constant,  and  it  is  only  on  the  basis  of  this  perma¬ 
nence  of  type  that  all  our  forms  of  classifications  are  pos¬ 
sible. 

Suppose  that  some  explorer  discovered  a  new  type  of 
animal  life  in  some  distant  country  and  that  the  scientists 
were  not  sure  whether  this  newly  discovered  creature  is 
an  anthropoid  ape  or  a  man.  How  would  this  new  speci¬ 
men  be  classified?  The  scientist  seeks  to  know  whether  it 
has  tools,  whether  it  speaks,  whether  it  has  society,  art, 
et  cetera,  that  is,  the  scientist  applies  the  universal  idea 
of  humanity  and  only  on  this  basis  can  the  new  instance  be 
manipulated. 

The  means  by  which  we  acquire  or  develop  knowledge 
is  through  the  possession  by  the  soul  of  this  capacity  for 
grasping  universals.  True  knowledge  comes  only  from  the 
activity  of  the  soul  in  the  acts  of  ordering  and  classifying 
the  particular  data  in  terms  of  the  universals. 

II.  The  Platonic  Theory  of  Reality  ( Metaphysics ) 

These  universals  through  which  we  know,  Plato  calls 
Ideas  (elS/),  ISccn)  forms,  kinds,  types,  universals.  These 
words  all  mean  the  same  in  Plato. 

In  the  Platonic  theory  there  are  two  realms.  The  one 
is  the  realm  of  the  Ideas,  which  is  the  realm  of  the  eternal. 
The  other  is  the  realm  of  sense  perception.  This  is  the 
region  of  the  mutable. 

It  is  important  to  guard  from  the  beginning  against  a 
confusion  which  prevails  even  in  the  camps  of  philosophers 
themselves  as  to  the  use  of  the  Platonic  term  idea.  The 
ordinary  man  takes  ideas  to  be  something  in  someone’s 
mind.  This  is  the  psychological  sense  of  the  term  idea, 
and  this  use  we  have  inherited  from  Locke,  Berkeley,  and 


PLATO 


99 


other  British  empiricists.  These  men  declare  that  we  know 
only  what  is  in  the  mind,  therefore  we  cannot  know  an 
objective  physical  world.  Plato  is  not  a  subjective  idealist. 
To  damn  a  dog  we  need  only  call  him  a  bad  name — this  has 
been  done  in  the  case  of  Plato,  but  the  Platonic  idea  is 
never  intended  to  be  something  in  our  mind.  The  Platonic 
idea  is  a  form,  a  pattern,  a  universal  type,  and  exists 
whether  any  human  mind  apprehends  it  or  not.  These 
ideas  exist  eternally  in  the  realm  of  ideas.  Thus  we  see 
that  Plato  does  not  mean  what  we  usually  mean  by  ideas 
— they  are  patterns,  forms  of  which  the  things  of  sense  are 
merely  bad  copies  or  imitations.  Or  again,  a  Platonic  idea 
is  an  eternally  existing  type  seeking  embodiment  in  par¬ 
ticular  contents,  and  because  of  the  obstructing  character 
of  the  material,  no  single  particular  is  an  adequate  em¬ 
bodiment  of  the  idea. 

This  brings  us  to  Plato ’s  conception  of  matter.  He  called 
it  nonbeing  (to  pyj  cv).  Matter  in  Plato  is  the  primitive, 
formless  stuff  out  of  which  individual  specimens  or  beings 
are  formed  through  the  influence  of  ideas  or  universal  types. 
He  does  not  mean,  however,  that  matter  does  not  exist ;  he 
means  to  suggest  that  it  is  not  a  specific  type  of  being.  He 
means  to  imply  that  there  is  indefinite  potentiality.  Matter 
is  nothing  in  itself,  but  it  is  that  out  of  which  all  particular 
things  are  made. 

What  then  is  the  Platonic  conception  of  the  mode  of 
operation  of  universals  on  matter  ?  At  this  point  Plato  has 
a  variety  of  answers.  Things  of  sense,  and  also  our  particu¬ 
lar  acts,  get  their  specific  characteristics  by  participation 
in  or  imitation  of  the  ideas.  Every  just  act  shares  in  the 
idea  of  justice,  every  man  shares  in  the  idea  of  humanity. 
The  realm  of  matter  is  the  abstract  possibility  of  both  par¬ 
ticular  beings  and  particular  acts.  There  are  therefore 
three  logically  distinguishable  factors  or  aspects  of  reality : 


100 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


1.  The  Ideas,  the  perfect  realities 

2.  Particular  things  and  acts,  which  actually  exist 

3.  Pure  Matter  or  Nonbeing.  This  is  an  abstraction  and 
does  not  exist  as  such 

What  exist  are  particular  facts,  which  are  due  to  the 
shaping  influence  of  the  Ideas  working  on  matter. 

The  ideas  are  dynamic,  they  are  causes.  They  effect  the 
work  of  molding  matter  into  the  form  of  particular  things 
that  exist  in  the  world  of  our  experience.  Our  world  is, 
therefore,  the  product  of  the  causal  action  of  ideas  on 
matter.  If  the  ideas  are  eternal  and  thus  have  causal 
efficacy,  why  do  they  not  produce  perfect  particulars? 
Why  does  not  the  kingdom  of  God  immediately  emerge? 
Why  does  not  perfection  in  our  ethical  experience  manifest 
itself  ?  Here  in  our  world  there  are  no  perfect  dogs,  no  per¬ 
fect  justice,  no  perfect  wisdom.  Why  not?  The  source 
of  all  particular  things  is  perfect.  The  reason  why  no 
particular  instance  is  perfect  is  that  matter  offers  obstruc¬ 
tion.  It  is  recalcitrant  to  the  operation  of  the  ideas.  Mat¬ 
ter  is  mulish.  There  is  a  brute,  irrational  necessity  in 
matter  that  obstructs  the  realization  of  ideas  in  matter. 
The  Platonic  view,  therefore,  is  a  teleological  idealism  in¬ 
volving  a  dualistic  element.  It  is  teleological  in  that  it 
interprets  the  world  in  terms  of  purpose  or  final  cause. 
It  is  dualistic  in  its  conception  of  the  two  kinds  of  exist¬ 
ence,  matter  and  ideas. 

Aristotle  holds  that  Plato  severed  the  realm  of  ideas  from 
the  world  of  sense.  Whether  or  not  Aristotle’s  criticism 
be  just,  at  any  rate  we  are  justified  in  saying  that  there 
is  a  dualistic  tinge  in  Platonism.  But  whether  Plato  re¬ 
garded  the  realm  of  Ideas  as  constituting  in  itself,  an 
entirely  separate  world,  one  existing  quite  apart  from  the 
material  embodiments  of  the  Ideas,  is  a  question  in  the 
interpretation  of  Plato  into  which  there  is  not  space  to 


PLATO  101 

enter  here.  At  least  he  meant  that  there  are  two  clearly 
distinct  orders  of  being : 

1.  Order  of  ideas 

2.  Order  of  perceptual  existence 

The  order  of  ideas  is  above,  but  it  enters  into  and  shapes 
the  order  of  matter  into  perceptual  existence.  The  realm 
of  ideas  is  thus  both  transcendent  and  immanent.  The 
ideas  of  Plato  are  transcendent  in  that  they  go  beyond 
actual  experience,  and  are  immanent  in  that  they  are  in¬ 
dwelling  and  operative  in  experience.  Plato’s  theory  of 
reality  is  also  pluralistic  to  this  extent,  namely,  that  there 
is  an  indefinitely  large  number  of  universals,  each  of  which 
really  exists.  The  essence  of  pluralism  is  that  there  are 
many  existents,  many  beings  that  exist.  But  Platonic 
philosophy  is  not  a  chaotic  pluralism.  The  ideas  consti¬ 
tute  a  system,  the  copestone  of  which  system  is  the  supreme, 
unitary  idea — The  Good,  the  many  in  one  or  the  one  in 
many. 

i/ 

It  is  unlikely  that  Plato  meant  that  the  two  logically 
distinct  spheres,  perceptual  existence  and  the  ideas,  should 
be  regarded  as  two  wholly  sundered  worlds.  The  proba¬ 
bility  is  that  he  regarded  them  simply  as  logically  distinct 
orders  of  existence.  It  is  not  easy,  however,  to  say  what 
Plato’s  view  was.  He  examines  the  difficulties  in  the  wray 
of  his  own  theories  and  repeatedly  revises  them.  Ilis  mind 
did  not  crystallize  into  an  unyielding  structure.  In  this 
respect  Plato  is  the  paragon  of  scholars.  The  constant 
prayer  of  the  scholar  should  be  this :  ‘  ‘  God  deliver  me 

from  having  a  crystallized  mind,  from  having  a  shut  up 
mind.”  There  is  nothing  so  impenetrable  as  such  a  mind. 
It  is  more  impenetrable  than  steel.  There  are  minds  into 
which  no  novel  idea  can  penetrate. 

The  lowest  factor  of  existence  is  that  of  brute  matter 
— mere  matter  which,  in  itself,  is  nonbeing.  The  precise 


102 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


meaning  of  this  concept  in  Plato’s  system  is  not  clear. 
Some  authorities  say  that  by  mere  matter  he  meant  space. 
At  any  rate  it  is  the  formless  stuff  about  which  nothing 
more  could  be  said,  because  it  is  formless.  The  second 
factor  is  the  realm  of  sense  experience,  and  in  this  realm 
we  can  distinguish  a  number  of  stages.  As  an  illustra¬ 
tion,  one  may  take  a  tree.  The  tree  embodies  more  uni¬ 
versals  than  its  seed.  Imagine  this  tree  sawed  into  planks. 
The  planks  mean  more  than  the  log.  These  planks  may 
be  further  utilized  and  elaborate  pieces  of  furniture  made 
out  of  them.  The  furniture  embodies  more  universals  than 
the  planks.  An  amoeba  is  not  a  very  highly  organized 
being,  but  man  is  highly  organized,  and  thus  he  expresses 
more  and  higher  universals.  The  scholar  is  much  higher 
than  the  ditch  digger  because  he  also  embodies  a  greater 
diversity  of  universals.  You  may  take  two  volumes,  both 
made  out  of  wood  pulp.  Suppose  that  one  of  these  is  the 
latest  best  seller,  and  the  other  a  volume  of  Plato  or  Berg¬ 
son.  The  difference  between  these  two  is  tremendous.  The 
Plato  or  Bergson  is  vastly  richer  in  meanings,  that  is, 
universals,  than  the  best  seller.  The  third  factor  is  the 
realm  of  ideas  or  universals.  Whether  this  is  for  Plato 
an  entirely  separate  realm  that  exists  by  itself  and  commu¬ 
nicates  itself  to  the  lower  stages  of  existence  is  not  clear. 
At  any  rate,  this  much  is  clear,  that  the  Ideas  or  Universals 
are  the  formative  and  ordering  principles  or  powers  from 
which  all  finite  beings  derive  their  structures,  their  places, 
and  worths  in  the  order  of  existence.  All  meanings  and 
values  are  derived  from  the  realm  of  universals. 

The  particular  thing  participates  in  many  ideas  or  uni¬ 
versals.  Plato  does  not  mean  that  man  participates  in 
nothing  but  humanity,  or  that  dog  participates  only  in 
caninity.  A  particular  is  a  meeting-point  for  many  uni¬ 
versals.  If  this  were  not  the  case  one  could  never  predicate 
any  attribute  of  any  subject.  The  only  possibility  would 


PLATO 


103 


be  to  say,  man  is  man  and  dog  is  dog,  et  cetera, 
we  say, 


Socrates  is 


r 


< 


V. 


good, 

wise, 

older  than, 
shorter  than, 
et  cetera. 


But 


Good,  however,  is  not  tall,  or  young,  or  old,  Good 
is  good.  But  unless  the  particular  does  participate  in 
a  multiplicity  of  universals,  it  would  be  contradictory  to 
make  any  judgments.  Only  on  this  basis  is  predication 
possible.  The  empirical  world,  therefore,  is  seen  to  be 
a  system,  not  a  chaos.  For  the  universals  constitute  the 
network  that  binds  particulars  together.  Anything  may 
have  anything  in  common  with  something  else.  A  bottle 
of  ink  on  the  table  and  the  symbol,  square  root  of  two, 
on  the  blackboard,  have  the  common  character  of  being 
in  the  same  spatial  whole.  It  is  a  fact,  therefore,  that 
every  individual  is  a  meeting-point  of  ideas,  and  thus 
is  the  sense  world  constituted  a  system. 

Particulars  of  sense  perception  never  adequately  em¬ 
body  universals,  and  it  is  for  this  reason  that  sense  particu¬ 
lars  are  always  imperfect.  Inasmuch  as  particulars  are 
a  system  through  sharing  in  the  universals,  the  universals 
themselves  constitute  a  system.  All  the  ideas,  or  forms  (of 
which  the  particulars  are  the  imperfect  embodiments), 
constitute  a  system.  The  forms  are  all  interrelated,  and, 
though  we  may  not  see  how  all  the  universals  are  related, 
we  can  see  how  some  are,  as,  ideas  of  justice  and  wisdom. 
We  see  that  we  cannot  be  truly  brave  without  being 
just.  We  can  see  how  moral  qualities  are  interrelated. 
We  can  also  see  how  certain  metaphysical  universals,  as 
one  and  many,  sameness  and  difference,  are  related.  Same¬ 
ness  has  no  meaning  apart  from  the  idea  of  difference,  and 


104 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


vice  versa :  If  the  world  were  a  blank  identity — as  Hegel 
said,  a  dark  night  in  which  all  cows  are  black — then  our 
judgments  involving  predications  of  differences  in  all  their 
forms  would  be  impossible.  It  is  the  fundamental  con¬ 
tention  of  Plato  that  universals  are  interrelated. 

The  supreme  work  of  knowledge  is  to  discover  what  are 
the  true  universals  or  Ideas  and  how  they  are  related.  The 
business  of  right  conduct  is  to  live  by  the  light  of  the  Ideas. 

The  idea  of  ihe  good  is  the  copestone  of  the  Platonic 
system.  This  is  the  supreme  idea.  The  Idea  of  the  good  is, 
for  Plato,  at  once  the  ultimate  Source  or  Ground  of  all 
concrete  existence ,  and  the  eternally  real  Ideal  or  Pattern 
of  all  excellence.  All  earthly  beauty  is  an  imperfect  reflec¬ 
tion  of  the  Eternal  Beauty,  all  earthly  truth  a  fragmentary 
apprehension  of  the  Eternal  Truth,  and  all  earthly  good  a 
copy  of  the  Eternal  Good.  The  Eternal  Good,  the  unitary 
principle  of  all  Truth  and  Beauty,  the  changeless  fulfillment 
of  values  is  God.  God,  for  Plato,  is  the  principle  of  absolute 
spiritual  perfection ,  everlastingly  real,  the  source  of  all 
lesser  perfections  and  the  pole  star  of  the  spirit.  The 
spirit  in  man  is  awakened  first  to  the  love  of  beautiful 
bodies ;  thence  it  passes  to  the  love  of  souls ;  thence  to  love 
of  the  Ideas ;  its  final  love  is  for  God.  Plato ’s  rationalism 
ends  in  a  mystical  vision  of  union  with  the  Divine.  All 
the  order  and  intelligibility,  all  the  meaningfulness  in 
our  world,  is  an  expression  of  the  divine  and  absolute 
reality.  In  so  far  as  we  understand  and  feel  and  act  wisely, 
just  so  far  we  grow  in  character  and  intellect  into  the 
likeness  of  the  absolute  and  divine  reality. 

The  Final  Cause  of  the  world  is  the  Idea  of  the  Good. 
The  world  exists  in  order  that  the  good  may  be  expressed 
in  a  multitude  of  beings.  Plato  says  that  God,  being 
animated  by  love  and  having  no  jealousy,  desires  that  all 
things  should  be  as  like  him  as  possible. 

As  to  the  details  of  creation,  it  is  impossible  to  give  any 


PLATO 


105 


exact  scientific  account.  The  doctrine  of  the  ideas,  how¬ 
ever,  Plato  holds  is  scientific.  It  is  not  a  myth,  although 
he  invents  many  myths,  and  many  of  these  have  entered 
deeply  into  the  texture  of  Christian  theology.  Before 
creation  there  was  this  primeval  potentiality  of  things 
(matter),  and  out  of  this  God  fashions  the  world.  In 
doing  this  God  first  creates  the  Demiurge,  the  agency  of 
creation  intermediate  between  Him  and  the  world  to  be 
created.  This  is  the  divine,  creative  principle  in  making 
the  world.  Its  functions  are  like  those  of  the  Logos  in  the 
New  Testament.  This  demiurge  is  the  energy  of  God  at 
work.  The  demiurge  then  fashioned  a  world  soul,  and  then 
fashioned  souls  for  each  planet  and  star,  after  which  he 
fashioned  souls  for  human  beings.  Thus  we  have : 

1.  World  soul 

2.  Planetary  souls 

3.  Human  souls 

All  this  process  is  effected  that  there  may  be  as  many  souls 
as  possible  in  the  likeness  of  the  divine. 

III.  Plato’s  Doctrine  of  the  Soul  ( Psychology ) 

The  soul  means  for  Plato  the  principle  of  life  and  con¬ 
sciousness.  We  are  here  interested  in  his  doctrine  of  the 
nature  of  the  human  soul.  The  human  soul  is  tripartite : 

1.  Highest  part  (noetic  part ) ,  vouc  ;  its  seat  is  in  the  head ; 

2.  Next  lower  part  (executive  part),  Gupcc ;  its  seat  is  in 
the  thorax; 

3.  The  lowest  part  (appetitive  part),  cmGuiha ;  its  seat 
is  in  the  abdomen. 

In  the  human  being,  however,  these  parts  form  an  inter¬ 
acting  whole. 

Plato  compares  the  human  soul  to  a  chariot  drawn  by 
two  steeds  and  driven  by  a  charioteer.  The  two  steeds  are 
the  spirited  part  and  the  part  which  consists  of  the  animal 


106 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


desires.  Desire  wishes  to  turn  aside  and  delay  at  the 
pleasant  places  of  life  while  the  spirited  part  is  impetuous 
to  rush  on,  and  so  it  is  the  province  of  nous  or  reason  to 
regulate  the  conduct  of  these  two. 

Nous  is  divine.  The  reason  of  man  is  the  highest  source 
of  knowledge.  It  is  through  the  reason  that  we  apprehend 
universals.  And  it  is  this  part  of  the  soul  that  did  not 
originate  with  the  body.  It  is  this  rational  part  of  the 
soul  which  shares  directly  in  the  nature  of  the  ideas.  The 
other  parts  thus  share  only  so  far  as  they  are  penetrated 
by  reason.  The  origin  and  destiny  of  the  vouc  is  inde¬ 
pendent  of  the  body.  True,  it  is  now  immersed  in  the 
body,  but  it  is  independent  of  the  body.  In  the  Phaedo 
this  is  Plato’s  main  argument  for  immortality. 

IV.  Plato’s  Theory  of  Human  Good 
( Ethics  and  Social  Philosophy) 

Plato  does  not  separate  ethics  from  social  philosophy. 
His  position  as  to  the  true  nature  of  man  is  the  same  as 
that  of  Aristotle.  Man  realizes  his  nature  only  through  a 
well-ordered  society.  The  function  of  the  state  as  the  high¬ 
est  form  of  social  organization  is  the  realization  of  virtue 
on  the  part  of  its  citizens.  The  state  exists  as  an  instru¬ 
ment  of  culture.  The  chief  means  whereby  the  state  ful¬ 
fills  its  function  as  such  an  instrument  is  education.  The 
ends  of  education  are  the  development  of  the  virtues  of 
the  self.  Plato  is  here  everlastingly  right.  This  is  the  only 
sound  theory  of  the  state’s  function.  Plato  insists  that 
the  state  is  to  afford  the  means  for  the  fullest  development 
of  its  citizens,  and  that  education  is  the  chief  means.  This 
calls  for  a  clear  and  consistent  doctrine  of  conduct  and 
character.  Plato  bases  his  whole  social  doctrine  on  his 


PLATO 


107 


psychological  analysis.  The  good  is  the  harmonious  func¬ 
tioning  of  the  three  parts  of  the  soul : 

1.  The  virtue  of  desire  is  self-control. 

2.  The  virtue  of  the  spirited  part  is  courage. 

3.  The  virtue  of  the  rational  part  is  philosophic  insight. 

4.  The  virtue  of  the  whole  system  is  justice  and  right¬ 
eousness. 

When  one  satisfies  appetites  under  the  consciousness  of 
consequences,  he  exercises  self-control.  When  one  lets 
loose  his  vigor  only  under  proper  circumstances,  then  one 
exhibits  courage.  Courage  is  not  the  running  amuck  of 
rashness.  Courage  for  Plato  is  the  fixed  resolve  to  go 
ahead  and  do  the  right  with  a  clear  consciousness  of  the 
dangers  involved.  Wisdom  is  philosophjq  and  philosophy 
is  insight  into  the  relations  of  life.  It  is  love  of  the  truest 
and  the  best.  The  exercise  of  wisdom  is  impossible  to  one 
who  has  a  keen  intellect  but  no  enthusiasm,  no  love  for 
knowledge  and  goodness.  Wisdom  is  the  fruit  of  the  union 
of  devotion  to  the  best  with  rational  insight. 

As  to  the  function  of  the  state,  Plato  holds  that  it  is  to 
provide  adequate  means  for  the  development  of  virtues. 
It  is  the  cultivation  of  the  individual  as  a  member  of  society 
that  the  state  is  to  effect ;  and  the  great  truth  in  Plato  is 
that  he  bases  his  social  and  educational  theory  on  the  psy¬ 
chological  analysis  of  the  individual.  The  state  is  the 
individual  writ  large. 

As  to  the  organization  of  the  state  in  regard  to  its  end 
and  the  mode  of  reaching  it,  Plato’s  idea  is  that  the  moral 
culture  of  its  citizens  is  what  is  to  be  furthered  by  this 
organization.  And  this  end  will  be  best  furthered  if  the 
state  be  ruled  by  an  aristocracy  of  character  and  intellect. 
Etymologically  the  term  “aristocracy”  means  the  rule 
of  the  best  and  not  the  rule  of  those  who  have  inherited 
wealth  or  special  privilege.  We  mean  by  aristocracy,  a 
class  having  special  privileges.  But  this  is  not  Plato’s 


108 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


meaning.  He  invariably  means  those  best  trained  for  the 
service  of  the  state.  It  is  to  make  one  fitted  to  play  his 
part  in  the  state  that  is  the  real  task  of  life.  When  one 
is  so  fitted,  he  will  have  personal  well-being.  This,  however, 
is  not  a  picture  of  an  actual  state ;  it  is  the  ideal  of  what  a 
state  might  be,  ought  to  be. 

There  are  three  classes  in  this  ideal  state,  and  they  cor¬ 
respond  respectively  to  the  three  divisions  in  the  soul  of 
the  individual.  A  large  number  of  individuals,  Plato 
thinks,  are  born  without  capacity  for  achieving  any  high 
degree  of  intellectual  insight — most  people  are  not  born 
to  be  philosophers.  A  good  many  also  are  not  born  to 
be  defenders,  guardians,  of  the  state,  because  they  lack 
that  moral  courage  which  is  necessary  to  a  guardian.  They 
are  to  supply  the  material  conditions  of  life ;  they  are  to 
be  agriculturists,  artisans,  business  men,  bankers.  We 
think  to-day  that  the  business  man  exercises  a  much  greater 
amount  of  insight  than  Plato  ever  ascribed  to  men  follow¬ 
ing  this  type  of  service.  The  virtue  which  stands  out  in 
this  class  is  self-control.  To  be  good  traders,  farmers,  arti¬ 
sans,  bankers,  they  must  exercise  self-control.  In  this  class 
Plato  will  allow  private  property  as  a  stimulus  to  their 
more  effectually  providing  the  physical  conditions  for  all 
the  social  classes.  The  two  upper  classes,  however,  are  to 
be  supported  at  the  expense  of  the  state,  but  are  not  to  be 
allowed  private  property.  For  Plato  is  of  the  opinion  that 
the  quest  for  riches  would  distort  their  sense  of  service, 
would  interfere  with  their  disinterestedness  of  spirit. 

The  men  of  strong  will,  of  courage,  are  to  be  the  guar¬ 
dians,  the  defenders  of  the  state, — here  as  well  as  in  the 
lowest  class,  Plato,  of  course,  assumes  that  a  modicum  of 
wisdom  is  required. 

The  third  class  consists  of  philosophers  for  whom  the 
consuming  passion  in  life  is  knowledge  and  virtue.  These 
are  to  be  the  kings  or  rulers  in  the  ideal  republic.  Plato 


PLATO 


109 


holds  that  only  those  born  with  the  fairest  and  noblest 
souls,  and  trained  from  their  youth  up,  are  fitted  to  rule. 
Only  the  wisest  and  best  should  rule.  The  fundamental 
virtues  of  the  lower  classes  are  theirs  as  well  as  wisdom. 
Self-control  and  courage,  crowned  by  the  knowledge  of  the 
nature  and  vocation  of  human  life,  this  is  the  life  of  the 
philosopher.  Those  born  with  the  highest  endowments  are 
to  be  trained  until  about  fifty  years  of  age.  Then  they  are 
ready  to  begin  the  work  of  ruling.  There  are  to  be  no 
young  rulers  in  the  Platonic  republic. 

Education  is  the  one  instrument  for  realizing  this  ideal, 
and  in  the  Republic  he  outlines  his  theory  of  education. 
The  basis  of  education  in  early  youth  is  bodily  exercises. 
A  sound  physical  foundation  must  be  laid.  There  must 
also  be  moral  instruction  and  this  is  to  come  through  narra¬ 
tion  of  myths  and  of  stories,  with  a  view  to  stimulation  of 
the  imagination  in  the  direction  of  right  conduct.  There 
is  to  be  a  cultivation  of  the  feelings  and  an  inculcation  of 
right  ideals.  Before  teaching  the  youths  the  stories  of  the 
past,  Plato  would  take  the  poets  and  their  stories  of  early 
heroes,  and,  indeed,  also  the  historians,  and  he  would  go 
through  them  with  a  blue  pencil,  he  would  strike  out  all 
unseemly  stories  of  the  gods,  he  would  present  no  intellec¬ 
tual  food  to  the  plastic  imagination  of  the  child  that  is 
degrading  or  suggestive  of  evil.  Thirdly,  music  is  to  be 
taught.  By  means  of  music  the  individual’s  feelings  are 
stirred,  refined  and  harmonized ;  and  for  all  the  Greeks  the 
sense  of  harmony,  of  proportion,  is  indispensable  to  the 
good  life.  Plato  rests  the  education  of  the  child  on  a  three¬ 
fold  foundation,  namely,  physical,  moral,  and  aesthetic. 

At  the  age  of  about  twenty,  a  selection  can  be  made  of 
those  fitted  to  go  on  further,  and  to  those  so  selected,  a 
thorough  training  is  to  be  given  in  mathematics.  Mathe¬ 
matics  is  the  type  of  science  for  Plato.  Then  would  come 
the  study  of  the  interrelations  of  the  subjects  already 


110 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


studied,  the  beginning  of  dialectic  or  philosophy.  At  the 
age  of  thirty,  a  still  further  selection  of  those  excelling  in 
mathematics  is  made.  Those  who  show  a  capacity  for  lead¬ 
ership  are  now  to  take  up  the  study  of  dialectic,  this  to 
continue  for  about  five  years,  after  which  they  are  ready 
to  serve  the  state  in  minor  offices  and  military  commands. 
Thus  at  the  age  of  about  fifty,  having  already  served  the 
state  for  approximately  fifteen  years,  those  who  have  ac¬ 
quitted  themselves  best  are  qualified  to  rule  and  to  continue 
to  do  so  until  they  retire,  whereupon  they  are  supported  at 
the  expense  of  the  state,  for  they  have  “done  their  bit.” 

The  idea  of  the  science  of  eugenics  is  developed  in  Plato. 
We  are  beginning  to-day  to  think  that  a  child  has  a  right 
to  decent  parentage ;  criminals,  idiots,  and  confirmed 
drunkards  ought  not  to  be  allowed  to  propagate  their  kind. 

Plato  was  the  first  to  advocate  eugenics.  He  would  place 
marriage  under  the  control  of  the  state.  The  state  exists 
for  the  production  of  the  highest  type  of  virtue  in  the  citi¬ 
zen,  and  for  this  the  individual  must  be  born  with  good 
capacities. 

Lately  we  have  been  diligently  and  aggressively  making 
the  world  safe  for  Democracy.  It  behooves  us  now  to  ask 
searchingly  what  Democracv  is  and  what  are  its  limita- 
tions?  Let  us  be  clear  as  to  what  Democracy  is  to  mean 
and  as  to  what  are  its  possibilities  and  problems.  Plato 
is  everlastingly  right  in  saving  that  no  amount  of  dema- 
gogic  oratory  will  alter  the  fact  that  individuals  are  not 
born  with  equal  capacities.  No  romancing  about  Democ¬ 
racy  will  alter  the  fact  that  a  state  not  run  on  the  basis  of 
merit  will  never  realize  the  highest  good.  Any  state  policy 
which  prevents  the  best  from  serving  their  state  has  some¬ 
thing  wrong  in  it.  Even  our  own  democracy  has  many 
defects,  among  which  are  a  general  lack  of  recognition  of 
need  of  the  highest  training  and  best  character  for  service 
of  the  state  and  society  in  public  office  and  low  educational, 


PLATO 


111 


cultural,  and  administrative  standards.  We  believe  that 
democracy  affords  the  best  opportunity  for  the  individual 
to  develop  his  native  powers,  but  actually,  as  a  people,  we 
show  scant  respect  for  individual  distinction  outside  the 
fields  of  business  and  politics. 


Hints  to  the  Study  of  Socrates-Plato 

The  dialogues  of  Plato  constitute  the  most  fascinating  extant 
collection  of  writings  by  a  single  philosopher.  They  all  show 
profundity  of  intellectual  and  moral  insight,  marvellous  keenness 
in  analysis,  skill  in  dialectic,  and  power  of  comprehensive  syn¬ 
thesis.  In  addition,  most  of  them  have  a  wonderful  charm  of 
style  and  dramatic  quality  of  movement.  Nevertheless,  their  sys¬ 
tematic  study  involves  considerable  difficulty.  The  chief  sources 
of  this  difficulty  are :  1.  The  method  pursued  is  that  of  per¬ 

sistent  critical  inquiry ,  “following  the  argument  wherever  it 
leads.”  The  primary  aim  of  the  dialogues  is  to  set  the  reader 
thinking  about  the  great  concerns  of  human  life.  But  the  educa¬ 
tion  of  the  reader  has  hitherto  been,  almost  invariably,  it  is  safe 
to  say,  dogmatic.  He  has  been  engaged  in  learning  facts  and 
theories.  The  teaching  of  science  in  our  schools  is  often  even 
more  dogmatic  than  the  teaching  of  literature  and  history.  He 
who  would  profit  by  Plato  must  be  ready  to  set  out  upon  a  voyage 
of  critical  inquiry,  without  being  in  a  hurry  to  get  into  port,  and 
must  abandon  all  “get  rich  quick”  educational  aims.1  2.  The 
very  dramatic  and  living  movement  of  the  dialogues  makes  it 
often  hard  to  keep  in  mind  the  thread  of  the  argument,  since  it 
shifts  from  one  subject  to  another.  But  there  is  always  reason 
for  the  shift.  3.  It  is  sometimes  difficult  to  say  which  position 
taken  in  the  discussion  is  Plato’s  own.  Usually  Socrates  is  the 
dramatic  mouthpiece  of  Plato,  but  the  reader  must  bear  in  mind 
that  the  dialogues  are  a  series  of  intellectual  or  spiritual  quests, 
proceeding,  now  inductively  now  deductively,  but  always  undog- 
matically.  Therefore,  the  arguments  con,  as  well  as  pro,  are 
given  full  consideration.  Plato  often  deliberately  aims  to  bring 
out  the  difficulties  in  his  own  position.  4.  We  have  no  means, 


1  Plato’s  Dialectic  or  Argumentation  is  both  inductive  and  deduc 
tive  in  method. 


112 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


except  the  internal  character  of  the  dialogues,  for  determining 
their  order,  and  Platonic  scholars  differ  very  much  on  this  ques¬ 
tion.  It  is  clear,  for  instance,  that  the  Laws  are  the  work  of 
Plato’s  old  age,  and  that  in  the  Phsedo,  Phaedrus,  Philebus, 
Sophist,  Symposium  and  Republic,  we  have  the  expression  of 
Plato’s  matured  views  at  the  zenith  of  his  powers.  But  where 
are  we  to  place  the  Parmenides,  which  contains  a  severe  criticism 
of  the  Theory  of  Ideas'?  And  are  we  to  regard  the  Charmides 
and  the  Laches,  the  Protagoras,  Meno,  Gorgias,  as  well  as  the 
Apology  and  the  Crito,  in  none  of  which  is  the  Metaphysical 
Theory  of  Ideas  fully  developed,  as  earlier  works  devoted  chiefly 
to  perpetuating  the  Socratic  personality  and  method,  or  are  we 
to  conclude  that,  since  Socrates  remains  the  central  figure 
throughout  the  dialogues,  Socrates  was  the  real  author  of  the 
Theory  of  Ideas  and  Plato  only  its  literary  expounder  and  ampli¬ 
fier?  If  all  the  chief  dialogues  represent  the  historical  Socrates, 
then  he  was  more  than  the  originator  of  a  method  of  inquiry 
which  he  applied  chiefly  to  moral  and  political  questions.  Then 
he  was  a  dialectician  and  a  synthetic  metaphysician  or  great 
speculative  philosopher.  It  is  beyond  the  scope  of  the  present 
volume  to  discuss  this  question.  I  shall  assume  the  prevalent 
view,  which  is  that  Socrates  was  primarily  the  author  of  a 
method  of  inquiry,  which  he  applied  chiefly  to  moral  and  social 
issues,  but  not  the  author  of  the  Platonic  Metaphysics  or  Theory 
of  Ideas.  This  view  is  in  harmony  with  the  statements  of  Aris¬ 
totle,  who  is  usually  a  trustworthy  source.2 

From  this  standpoint  the  chief  dialogues  of  Plato  would  fall 
roughly  into  the  following  groups :  3 

1.  Socratic — Lysis,  Laches,  Charmides,  Euthyphro.  Appli¬ 
cation  of  Socratic  method  to  the  investigation  of  the  meaning  of 
virtue.  Crito  and  Apology  (biographical  memorials  of  Socrates). 


2  It  does  not  seem  possible,  in  the  present  state  of  our  knowledge, 
to  draw  any  sharp  dividing  line  between  the  work  of  Socrates  and 
Plato.  Nor  is  it  essential  to  an  understanding  and  appreciation 
of  the  Dialogues.  One  might,  indeed,  call  the  whole  system  the 
philosophy  of  “Platocrates.” 

3  1  am  not  here  attempting  to  determine  the  chronological  order 
of  the  Dialogues.  I  am  not  competent  to  this  task.  It  is  clear  that 
certain  of  the  dialogues  are,  preeminently,  memorials  of  the  per¬ 
sonality  of  Socrates,  that  certain  others  are  dedicated  to  the  dis¬ 
cussion  of  ethical  questions  in  the  spirit  of  Socrates,  and  that  others 
are  concerned  with  the  building  up  of  a  systematic  theory  of  knowl¬ 
edge  and  reality. 


PLATO 


113 


2.  Refutation  of  the  Relativistic  and  Skeptical  theories  of 
the  Sophists  and  development  of  a  constructive  theory  of  Truth 
by  the  Socratic  method.  Protagoras,  Euthydemus,  Meno,  Gorgias, 
Thesetetus. 

3.  Full  expression  of  the  Platonic  Theory  of  Ideas  — 
Phasdo,  Phajdrus,  Symposium,  Philebus,  Sophist,  Republic,  es¬ 
pecially  sections  476  ft.,  Parmenides. 

4.  Application  of  the  Theory  of  Politics  and  Cosmology  re¬ 
spectively;  Republic  (in  part)  and  Timgeus. 

5.  The  Laws. 

The  following  hints  may  be  of  aid  to  the  student  in  reading 
the  dialogues  selected.  Unless  otherwise  stated  all  numbers  refer 
to  the  sections  of  the  text  of  Plato  which  are  printed  in  the  pages 
of  the  Greek  text  and  the  translations. 

Protagoras 

Notice  the  essential  community  of  interest  of  Protagoras  and 
Socrates :  both  are  interested  in  the  moral  education  of  the  young. 
Both  hold  that  virtue  can  be  taught,  and  that  all  men  have  it 
potentially.  Their  disagreement  is  on  the  method  of  teaching. 
Notice  how  Protagoras  dictates  his  views  in  an  authoritative  man¬ 
ner  ( cf .  the  tale  of  Prometheus,  and  the  discussion  of  the  poets), 
while  Socrates  seeks  by  questions  to  draw  out  the  ideas  of  the 
learner.  Notice  that  Socrates,  too,  can  make  speeches,  but  does 
not  set  any  value  upon  that  method.  Here  is  the  typical  oppo¬ 
sition  between  the  Socratic-Platonic  theory  of  knowledge  and  the 
Sophistical  theory.  Notice  how  Socrates  bases  his  conviction, 
that  virtue  is  teachable,  upon  the  position  that  virtue  is  the  prac¬ 
tical  working  out  of  an  idea  or  ideal,  and  ideas  are  the  things 
which  above  all  others  are  teachable.  ( Cf.  the  classification  of  all 
particular  virtues  as  cases  of  a  single  unitary  conception.)  And 
note  finally  that  Socrates  maintains  that  pleasure  alone  is  not 
man’s  highest  good,  but  the  intelligent  choice  of  pleasures. 

Meno 

Note  1.  The  general  subject  of  discussion.  2.  The  line  of 
thought  represented  by  the  several  characters.  3.  The  sub¬ 
divisions  of  the  question.  4.  The  light  thrown  upon  the  fol¬ 
lowing  important  questions:  (a)  The  Socratic-Platonic  theory  of 
virtue,  (b)  the  theory  of  knowledge,  (c)  the  solution  of  the 


114 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


Sophistical  difficulty  as  to  how  one  knows  when  he  knows,  (d) 
the  potentiality  of  even  a  slave’s  mind.  In  the  Meno  the  general 
subject  of  discussion  is  whether  Virtue  can  be  taught.  The  view 
is  advanced  that  Virtue ,  and  hence  Happiness ,  depends  on  Wis¬ 
dom  or  Knowledge ;  and  the  doctrine  that  Knowledge  presup¬ 
poses  the  latent  presence  of  Ideas  or  Universals  in  the  mind,  in 
other  words,  the  Platonic  doctrine  of  Recollection,  is,  for  the 
first  time,  perhaps,  clearly  set  forth.  The  conclusion  seems  nega¬ 
tive,  but  the  statement  “that  virtue  is  neither  natural  nor  ac¬ 
quired,  but  an  instinct  given  by  God  to  the  virtuous”  is  really 
in  harmony  with  the  doctrine  of  Recollection. 

Gorgias 

The  Gorgias,  which  is  a  fitting  companion  to  the  Republic, 
starts  out  with  an  inquiry  into  the  nature  of  Rhetoric.  After 
some  debate,  the  conclusion  is  reached  that  Rhetoric  is  the  art  of 
persuasion  about  the  just  and  the  unjust  (453).  Then  Socrates 
points  out  the  difference  between  belief,  which  may  be  true  or 
false,  and  knowledge,  which  can  only  be  true.  Rhetoric  produces 
false  beliefs  and  gives  no  instruction.  Rhetoric  is  a  form  of 
flattery  having  to  do  with  politics  (463-467).  This  leads  to  the 
inquiry  into  the  end  of  politics  and  government.  What  is  power 
for?  Socrates  contends  that  power  must  be  exercised  for  the  sake 
of  the  good  (468  ff.),  and  that  doing  injustice  is  the  greatest  of 
evils,  greater  even  than  suffering  injustice.  He  contends  too, 
that  the  unjust  man  is  more  miserable  if  not  punished  than  if 
punished  (473).  Injustice,  and,  in  general,  the  evil  of  the  soul, 
is  the  most  disgraceful  and  worst  of  all  things  (477).  The  true 
rhetoric,  then,  is  of  no  use  in  enabling  men  to  excuse  injustice 
(480).  The  wrongdoer  ought  to  accuse  himself,  in  order  to  save 
his  soul.  At  this  point  Callicles  intervenes  with  the  protest  that 
all  this  philosophy  is  for  youth  and  children,  not  for  grown-ups, 
and  that  Socrates  is  making  himself  ridiculous.  Callicles  takes 
up  the  cudgels  for  politics,  first  as  the  rule  of  the  many,  then  he 
shifts  to  the  rule  of  the  superior  who  are  wise  and  courageous. 
He  contends  that  pleasure  is  the  good  (492).  Socrates  argues 
that  the  good  is  not  the  same  as  the  pleasant,  but  the  pleasant  is 
for  the  sake  of  the  good  (497  ff.).  All  seek  the  good  (500),  but 
the  bad  man  does  not  know  how  to  find  it.  The  good  is  order  and 
harmony  (504),  and  the  true  rhetorician  he  who  seeks  to  im¬ 
plant  justice  in  the  souls  of  men.  There  follows  a  severe  indict- 


PLATO 


115 


ment  of  the  popular  politician,  who  seeks  power  by  flattery,  and 
thereby  makes  men  worse.  Pericles  and  others  are  included  in 
this  class  (509-521).  Socrates  contends  that  he  is  the  only  true 
politician  of  his  time,  since  he  seeks  only  to  improve  the  souls  of 
his  fellow  Athenians  (522).  The  dialogue  ends  with  a  myth  or 
story,  embodying  Socrates’  belief  that  the  fulfillment  of  justice 
requires  a  future  life  for  the  souls  of  men,  in  which  judgment  is 
meted  out  to  them  for  the  deeds  done  in  the  body.  Punishment 
is  of  two  kinds  (a)  corrective,  to  improve  the  souls  of  those 
punished,  (b)  exemplary,  in  the  case  of  those  incapable  of  being 
corrected,  to  warn  others  who  have  not  yet  gotten  irreparably 
lost  in  wickedness.  The  Gorgias  makes  a  very  vigorous  and 
dramatic  contrast  between  the  true  life  and  the  false  one.  It  is, 
in  spirit,  a  truly  Socratic  dialogue.  In  the  ideal  of  the  just  man 
we  have  one  of  those  ultimate  moral  insights  which  mankind  owes 
to  the  prophetic  vision  of  one  or  two  members  of  its  own  race. 

The^etetus 

The  dialogue  is  concerned  with  the  definition  of  knowledge, 
and  this  involves  a  definition  of  error.  Three  conceptions  of 
knowledge  are  discussed:  1.  Knowledge  is  perception  (151): 
2.  It  is  true  opinion  (187)  :  3.  It  is  true  opinion,  based  on 

insight  into  the  grounds  or  reasons  for  it  (201,  202).  The  first 
conception  of  knowledge  is  that  of  Protagoras,  the  Sophist.  It 
is  based  on  the  doctrine  of  Universal  Becoming,  that  is,  of  the 
“river-gods”  (Heracliteans).  If  all  is  in  flux,  then  the  individual 
percipient  is  the  measure  of  truth.  But  then  a  pig  or  a  dog¬ 
faced  baboon  is  the  measure  of  all  things  (161).  Then  there  is 
no  distinction  between  truth  and  falsehood.  On  the  universal- 
flux  doctrine  there  can  be  no  error.  But  mankind  does  distin¬ 
guish  true  and  false  (170),  and  counting  heads  does  not  deter¬ 
mine  truth.  Therefore  he  must  be  a  wise  man  who  is  the  measure 
of  things.  Knowledge  does  not  consist  in  impressions  of  sense, 
but  in  reasoning  about  them.  Thinking  is  systematic  reflection, 
by  which  the  soul  contemplates  universals  in  all  things  (185). 
Thus  we  do  not  see  and  learn  by  the  eyes  and  ears,  but  through 
them.  Note  the  reasons  for  rejecting  the  identification  of  knowl¬ 
edge  with  perception  in  sections  154,  158,  161,  163,  165,  170, 
171,  178,  182,  184  f.  Note  the  four  proposed  explanations  of 
error  in  sections  189,  191,  192,  193. 


116 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


Symposium  and  Ph^drus 

These  two  dialogues  are  best  read  in  sequence,  since  the  theme 
of  the  Symposium  is  continued  in  the  first  part  of  the  Plicedrus. 
The  theme  is  Love,  which  is  treated  as  being  the  supreme  motive 
in  human  life  and  conduct.  Love  is  intermediate  between  the 
mortal  and  the  divine  (Sym.  203,  204),  between  having  and  not 
having.  Love  is  the  desire  for  immortality,  sought  through  birth 
in  beauty.  Love  is  the  desire  for  the  everlasting  possession  of 
the  good  (206  A).  The  lower  love  seeks  immortality  through 
birth  in  physical  beauty  and  the  procreation  of  children.  The 
highest  love  seeks  immortality  through  union  with  absolute  beauty, 
which  is  one  with  the  absolutely  Good  and  True — in  other  words 
true  immortality  is  attained  through  spiritual  procreation, 
through  the  rebirth  of  the  soul  into  eternity,  by  the  reproduction 
in  it  of  justice,  temperance,  wisdom  (208).  The  final  cause  or 
goal  of  all  our  toils  is  a  life  consisting  in  the  contemplation  of 
“beauty  absolute,  separate,  simple  and  everlasting,  which  with¬ 
out  diminution  and  without  increase,  or  any  change,  is  imparted 
to  the  ever-growing  and  perishing  beauties  of  all  other  things” 
(211).  Thus  life  is  an  ascent,  motivated  by  the  ascent  of  love 
or  desire,  from  union  with  the  sensuous  to  union  with  the  ideal 
and  eternal  realities  of  the  spirit. 

In  the  Plicedrus  the  same  theme  is  carried  on  up  to  Sec.  257. 
Love  is  the  desire  for  the  beautiful  and  good  (237-241) ;  for 
union  with  the  divine,  which  is  beauty,  wisdom,  goodness,  and 
the  like.  Everyone  chooses  the  object  of  his  affections  accord¬ 
ing  to  his  character  (252),  and  thus  sees  the  beauty  that  he  is 
able  to  see,  sensuous  or  ideal.  Here  we  find  (245-251)  Plato’s 
psychology  outlined.  The  soul  is  self-moving,  therefore  eternal, 
immortal  (245) ;  it  consists  of  three  parts  symbolized  as  a  pair 
of  winged  horses,  one  ignoble  and  the  other  noble,  driven  by  a 
charioteer — the  mind  or  reason.  Mind  or  intelligent  soul  alone 
is  able  to  behold  the  colorless  and  formless  and  intelligible  essences 
of  beauty,  wisdom,  goodness,  and  the  like  (247  ff.).  Mind  is 
able  to  do  that  in  this  present  life,  because  it  has  preexisted. 
Plato  explicitly  brings  forward  the  doctrine  of  reincarnation 
(249  etc.),  and  of  recollection  or  anamnesis  (250-251),  as  the 
only  plausible  theory  to  account  for  the  mind’s  possession  and 
use  of  universals  or  abstract  ideas.  This  is  the  form  of  a 
priorism  or  rationalism  found  in  Plato.  We  shall  find  it  re- 


PLATO 


117 


peated  in  a  more  abstruse  form  in  Kant.4  Truth  is  the  recollec¬ 
tion  of,  the  awakening  to,  in  this  life,  the  visions  of  the  eternal 
essences  or  ideas  formerly  seen  while  dwelling  in  other  realms 
of  being.  The  soul  which  attains  any  vision  of  truth,  beauty 
and  goodness,  during  its  worldly  peregrinations,  is  thereby  pre¬ 
served  from  harm.  In  the  Symposium  and  PhaBdrus  love  is  de¬ 
picted  as  a  kind  of  madness  or  enthusiasm.  The  lower  love  of 
the  senses  is  not  evil  unless  the  soul  is  content  to  remain  in  it 
and  does  not  use  it  as  a  ladder  to  mount  to  the  spiritual  love. 

The  second  part  of  the  Phaedrus,  beginning  with  S.  257,  is 
a  discussion  of  the  nature  of  rhetoric,  and  -would  better  be  omitted 
on  a  first  reading. 


Phcedo 

The  Phcedo,  Republic ,  Philebus ,  and  Sophist,  constitute  a 
group  of  dialogues  in  which  the  Theory  of  Ideas,  and  its  applica¬ 
tion  to  ethics,  social  philosophy,  metaphysics  and  religion,  are 
expounded  in  full  and  mature  form.  The  Parmenides  and  the 
Statesman  belong  here,  but  the  Parmenides  is  too  difficult  and 
puzzling  a  dialogue  to  be  considered  by  the  beginner.  In  fact, 
so  puzzling  is  the  problem  of  its  relation  to  the  other  chief 
dialogues  of  the  master,  that  many  scholars  reject  its  authen¬ 
ticity. 

The  Phcedo  is  a  discourse  on  the  Immortality  of  the  Soul, 
which  develops  into  a  statement  of  the  Theory  of  Ideas,  of  Pre¬ 
existence  and  Recollection.  The  immateriality  of  the  intelligent 
soul,  and  the  contrast  between  soul  and  body  are  strongly  em¬ 
phasized.  Death  is  but  the  culmination  of  the  constant  aim  of 
the  lover  of  wisdom  and  truth — freedom  from  the  thraldom  of  the 
senses  (63,  64,  66-69).  The  soul  attains  truth,  the  vision  of  the 
abstract  and  absolute  essences — justice,  beauty,  good  (65), 
mathematical  essences  or  universals  such  as  likeness,  unlikeness, 
equality  (73,  74,  75) — not  through  the  eye  of  the  body  but 
through  the  inward  eye.  ( Cf .  also  100.)  All  genuine  knowl¬ 
edge  is  recollection.  The  soul  must,  therefore,  have  existed  before 
the  body  which  it  now  inhabits  and  will  survive  the  body  (73-78). 
The  soul  is  invisible,  since  it  knows  the  invisible  realities;  the 
body  is  its  instrument  (79).  The  soul  is  in  the  likeness  of  the 
divine,  and  immortal,  and  intelligible,  and  uniform,  and  un- 


*  Cf.  Chapter  XVII. 


118  THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 

changeable;  and  the  body  is  in  the  likeness  of  the  opposites  of 
these  qualities  (80).  The  purified  soul  will  depart  at  death  from 
hence  to  the  invisible  world  (81).  Impure  souls  will  descend 
lower.  Philosophy  is  the  means  for  the  purification  of  the  soul 
and  its  consequent  release  from  its  bodily  prison  (82-84).  In 
85-95  the  theory  that  the  soul  is  the  harmony  of  the  body  is  ex¬ 
amined  critically  and  rejected  on  the  ground  that  it  makes  the 
soul  depend  on  the  body.  The  culminating  argument,  in  101-106, 
from  the  nature  of  opposites,  is  that  the  soul  is  essentially  Life 
and,  since  this  is  the  opposite  of  Death,  it  must  be  eternal.  The 
discussion  ends  with  a  myth  or  poetic  fable  in  regard  to  the 
realms  beyond  this  world  and  the  fate  of  souls  therein.  The 
dominating  doctrine  of  the  Phaedo  is  that  the  supreme  reality 
is  a  system  of  Unchangeable  Essences ,  the  Ideas.  These  are  iden¬ 
tified  with  Life  or  Soul.  By  means  of  the  Ideas  the  changing 
realm  of  the  sensible  order  is  known.  The  ruling  law  of  Being 
is  the  Good,  which  is  identical  with  order  or  Cosmos.  Note  that 
the  Phmdo  is  the  most  ascetic  or  dualistic  in  strain  of  Plato’s 
dialogues.  Nowhere  else  does  he  speak,  with  such  repeated  em¬ 
phasis,  of  the  body  as  a  hindrance  and  clog  to  the  soul.  It  is  to 
distort  Plato’s  life  Hew  and  world  view  to  isolate  this  single 
phase  of  so  many-sided  and  comprehensive  a  philosophical  mind 
as  his  and  make  it  representative  of  the  whole.  Not  only  the 
Symposium  and  Phaedrus,  but  the  treatment  of  pleasure  in  the 
Philebus  and  elsewhere,  and  the  consideration  accorded  bodily 
training  in  the  Republic  forbid  our  regarding  Plato  as  an  ascetic 
kill-joy.  His  prevailing  doctrine  is  that  the  body,  with  its 
appetites  and  impulses,  is  the  instrument  of  the  rational  soul. 
There  is  a  bodily  soul,  the  seat  of  desire  and  emotion,  which  is 
spiritualized  through  the  Nous  or  intelligent  soul. 

The  Republic,  Philebus,  and  Sophist 

The  Republic  is  the  widest  in  scope,  and  the  richest  in  content, 
©f  all  Plato’s  dialogues.  It  is  too  many-sided  to  be  even  briefly 
summarized  here.  But  attention  may  be  called  to  some  of  its 
most  salient  features,  as  an  aid  to  the  reader.5  The  controlling 
purpose  of  the  work  is  an  inquiry  into  the  nature  and  end  of 
human  society  as  determined  and  achieved  by  Mind.  The  Re¬ 
public  is  a  philosophy  of  society,  which  is  based  on  a  social  psy- 


5  B.  Bosanquet,  A  Companion  to  Plato’s  Republic  is  recommended. 


PLATO 


119 


cliology,  a  logic,  a  doctrine  of  ethical  values,  a  theory  of  education, 
and  a  metaphysics  or  philosophy  of  reality  and  religion.  The 
work  sets  out,  in  Book  I,  from  a  preliminary  examination  of 
popular  and  sophistical  notions  of  justice.  All  other  virtues 
are  applications  of  justice  considered  as  a  quality  of  individual 
character.  It  is  to  be  noted  that  Plato  uses  the  same  word 
dikaiosune,  for  justice  as  involved  in  the  right  social  relationships 
of  individuals,  and  for  righteousness  or  goodness  as  a  quality 
of  individual  character.  Since  the  word  is  usually  translated 
“justice”  the  reader  needs  to  be  on  his  guard  against  confusion. 
The  same  double  usage  is  found  in  the  New  Testament,  though, 
of  course,  the  latter  is  seldom  concerned  with  questions  of  political 
or  legal  justice.  The  outcome  of  Book  I  is  that  an  examination 
must  be  made  of  the  nature  of  the  state.  So  Book  II  begins  with 
an  inquiry  into  the  origin  of  the  state,  which  is  found  in  man’s 
economic  needs.  The  conduct  of  the  state,  for  the  satisfaction 
of  these  needs,  requires  a  differentiation  of  functions  in  its  mem¬ 
bers.  There  must  be  guardians,  and,  in  Book  II,  374-376,  the 
qualities  which  these  must  possess  are  stated.  The  problem  of 
their  education  leads  in  377  ff.  to  a  criticism  on  the  poets  for 
their  depictions  of  the  Gods.  In  379-383  it  is  insisted  that  God 
is  not  the  author  of  the  evil  and  shameful  things  found  in  human 
beings.  Book  III,  up  to  411,  continues  the  examination  of 
poetry,  music  and  other  means  for  the  education  of  the  guardians. 
In  420,  at  the  beginning  of  Book  IV  it  is  insisted  that  the  state 
is  an  organic  unity,  and  the  object  of  it  is,  not  to  make  any  one 
class  preeminently  happy,  but  to  make  the  whole  state  as  happy 
as  it  can  be  made.  Therefore  the  guardians  are  not  to  have 
private  property.  From  428  to  the  end  of  Book  IV  the  funda¬ 
mental  virtues  are  discussed,  with  reference  to  the  various  psycho¬ 
logical  functions  of  the  soul.  Book  V,  up  to  471,  discusses  the 
position  of  women  and  children  in  the  ruling  class.  Community 
is  advocated  and  a  similar  education  for  both  sexes.  Plato  then 
comes  to  the  education  of  the  philosophers,  that  is,  the  experts, 
or  men  wise  in  both  theory  and  practice,  who  are  to  be  the  rulers 
of  the  state.  Plato  does  not  mean  that  the  philosopher-kings 
should  be  mere  “theorisers.”  A  philosopher  is  one  who  loves 
and  does  the  truth,  one  whose  actions  are  based  on  a  rational 
insight  into  Values  and  the  means  by  which  they  can  be  realized. 
The  distinction  is  made  between  opinion ,  which  is  all  the  many 
are  capable  of  having,  the  sciences  of  exist ents  (what  we  to-day 
would  call  “the  special  sciences”),  and  Dialectic  or  Philosophy 


120 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


proper,  which  involves  insight  into  the  being  and  nature  of  Es¬ 
sences  or  Ideas.  From  505  to  535A  there  is  developed,  in  out¬ 
line,  Plato’s  Theory  of  Knowledge  and  Reality  (Metaphysics). 
The  Supreme  Essence,  Idea  or  Form,  is  the  Essential  Form  of 
the  Good  (505) ;  it  is  the  Cause  and  Ground  of  all  things  (508, 
509,  517,  etc.).  It  is  the  Sun  of  the  world  of  reality  and  truth. 
It  is  not  truth,  but  the  condition  of  our  seeing  truth.  It  is  not 
existence,  but  the  condition  of  the  being  of  existence  and  of 
that  vision  or  apprehension  of  existence,  which  is  truth  for  the 
thinker.  Thus  the  good  actually  transcends  existence  in  power 
and  dignity  (509).  It  is  the  limit  of  our  inquiries  and  can 
hardly  be  perceived  (517).  Dialectic  or  philosophy  is  the  sci¬ 
ence  of  the  good  (533-534).  (In  this  connection  should  be  read 
596-7  in  Book  X  where  Plato  makes  the  distinction  between  the 
“essential  bed”  the  pattern  or  rule  for  making  a  bed,  the  manu¬ 
factured  bed,  and  the  pictorial  imitation  of  bed.  From  this  sec¬ 
tion  it  seems  clear  that  Plato  admitted  Ideas  of  artefacts.6)  At 
the  beginning  of  Book  VII  occurs  Plato’s  famous  figure  of  the 
mass  of  men  as  denizens  of  a  cave,  chained  with  their  backs  to 
the  light,  who  can  never  see  the  true  realities  but  only  their 
shadows  as  reflected  from  behind  them  on  the  walls  of  the  cave. 
The  function  of  philosophy  is  to  remove  the  chains  from  such  as 
can  be  taught  to  see  the  Forms  or  Ideas.  But  the  capacity  for 
the  gaining  of  wisdom  must  be  inborn  in  the  soul;  otherwise,  it 
cannot  be  developed  by  any  training.  (One  cannot  make  a  silk 
purse  out  of  a  sow’s  ear  and  most  men  cannot  attain  to  any 
height  of  wisdom!)  Note  the  unflattering  portraiture  of  Greek 
democracy  and  Plato’s  defence  of  philosophy  in  488-502.  Dia¬ 
lectic  is  the  science  of  sciences,  and  mathematics  is  the  gateway 
to  the  palace  of  the  royal  science  7  (522-535).  Book  VIII  dis¬ 
cusses  the  various  forms  of  political  constitutions,  and  Book  IX 
the  character  of  the  tyrannical  man,  in  contrast  with  that  of  the 
happy  and  just  man.  Book  X,  after  a  discussion  of  poetic  art, 
concludes  with  the  myth  of  the  Son  of  Er,  setting  forth  a  fable 
of  future  retribution  for  the  souls  of  men.  Thus  ends  the  mas¬ 
terpiece  of  the  master  of  all  speculative  seers  and,  with  the 
exception  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth,  the  greatest  spiritual  creator  in 

6  Much  controversy  has  waged  about  this  point.  Professor  J.  S. 
MacKenzie  thinks  this  passage  a  bit  of  playful  humor  directed  by 
Plato  against  his  misunderstanders. 

7  See  the  comparison  of  Plato’s  and  Hegel’s  Dialectic  in  the  note 
on  pp.  266-7. 


PLATO 


121 


the  recorded  history  of  mankind.  The  Republic  has  not  the 
orderly  and  progressive  unity  that  we  should  expect  from  a 
Plato,  were  he  creating  to-day.  But,  in  its  interweaving  of  psy¬ 
chological  analysis,  ethical,  logical,  and  metaphysical  insight,  with 
mystic  vision,  the  Republic  achieves  a  unity  and  ascends  to  an 
altitude  that  leaves  it  still  peerless.  The  dominant  motive  of  the 
entire  work  is  the  perfecting  of  the  human  soul ,  the  fulfillment 
of  the  spirit  in  the  beauty  of  holiness.  To  this  end,  the  organ¬ 
ization  of  society,  the  conduct  of  education,  and  the  vision  of 
truth  itself,  are  all  instrumental.  Therefore  the  state  is  to  be 
constructed  and  conducted  after  the  analogy  of  the  soul-life 
( cf .  368-9,  etc.).  Civic  virtue  or  social  justice  is  the  fitting  of 
every  soul  to  its  proper  functions  and  the  exercise  of  these 
functions  by  all  souls  “as  members  one  of  another.”  Note  the 
aesthetic  qualities  of  the  Good  (400-403).  Rhythm,  harmony, 
or  order,  in  the  soul,  is  the  good.  Throughout  the  dialogues  of 
Plato  there  runs,  like  a  golden  thread,  the  theme  that  the  good 
is  the  truly  beautiful,  that  Righteousness,  Beauty,  and  Truth 
have  their  concrete  and  living  unity  of  being  and  action  in  the 
soul  that  is  symmetrically  developed  and,  therefore,  functions  in 
an  orderly  and  harmonious  manner.  The  soul  that  knows  the 
truth  and  does  it,  shines  with  spiritual  beauty  and  is  in  harmony 
with  the  perfect  and  eternal  order — with  the  Cosmos.  For  the 
supreme  truth  of  being  is  that  Reality  is  a  perfectly  ordered 
and  harmonious  whole,  which  is  the  Absolute  Good.  The  Cosmos 
is  a  righteous  order  and  altogether  lovely.  Such  is  the  final  in¬ 
sight  and  message  of  Plato. 

Philebus  and  Sophist.  The  two  outstanding  doctrines  of  these 
dialogues  are — 1.  The  Ideas  or  Universals  constitute  a  system  of 
forms  or  types  that  are  in  communion  with  one  another,  in  other 
words  are  interrelated;  for  example,  the  One  and  the  Many  or 
the  Limited  and  the  Unlimited,  the  Same  and  the  Different,  Rest 
and  Motion  or  Permanence  and  Change.  Each  member  of  a  pair 
implies  the  other,  and  also  members  of  other  pairs.  2.  Mind,  or 
Soul  is  the  Force  or  Power  which  is  the  First  and  Final  Cause 
of  all  creation.  Mind  is  the  unitary  ground  of  the  Ideas. 

Philebus.  In  this  dialogue  Plato  discusses,  in  a  more  dia¬ 
lectical  or  metaphysical  fashion,  the  central  theme  of  the  Re¬ 
public,  the  Idea  of  the  Good.  Setting  out  from  the  question 
whether  the  good  life  consists  in  pleasure  or  wisdom,  the  doctrine 
is  developed  that  the  true  good  consists  in  a  harmonious  or  sym¬ 
metrical  mixture  of  thought  and  feeling,  in  which  thought  oc- 


122 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


cupies  the  ruling  place.  It  is  agreed  that  happiness  or  well¬ 
being  of  the  soul  is  the  good;  and  (in  12)  Socrates  suggests 
that  happiness  may  be  a  third  state  of  the  soul,  which  is  better 
than  either  wisdom  or  pleasure  but  more  akin  to  wisdom.  Both 
pleasures  and  sciences  are  many  and  diverse  (12  ff.) ;  the  world 
of  generation  or  sense  experience  is  an  indefinite  Many  (the 
Unlimited),  but  every  kind  of  thing  has  its  Idea  or  Universal 
(the  Limit  or  principle  of  Unity) ;  therefore  the  One  and  Many 
are  present  in  all  things  (15).  Thus  the  problem  of  the  good 
involves  that  of  the  One  and  the  Many.  But  we  must  not  be 
content  with  this  vague  insight;  in  order  to  attain  scientific  in¬ 
sight  we  must  determine  the  precise  numbers  or  quantitative  pro¬ 
portions  which  hold  in  every  field.  For  example,  the  gram¬ 
marian  must  know  the  precise  number  and  relations  of  speech 
sounds  and  letters,  the  musician  of  the  sounds  which  yield  musi¬ 
cal  harmony  and  rhythm;  just  so  with  regard  to  pleasures  and 
sciences  (17-18).  Pleasure  is  impossible  without  soul  or  mind, 
since  without  memory,  hope,  and  knowledge  there  can  be  no 
desire  (21).  The  good  life  is  the  union  of  pleasure  and  wisdom; 
it  is  a  harmonious  or  symmetrical  mixture,  the  union  of  the  in¬ 
finite  and  the  finite,  or  the  Limit  and  the  more  and  less  (22-23). 
Throughout  the  world  the  same  principle  obtains;  health,  music, 
good  weather,  involve  a  commensurable  and  harmonious  inter¬ 
mingling  of  elements.  Law  and  Order  is  the  universal  prin¬ 
ciple  of  the  Good.  The  cause  of  the  proper  mixture  is  Mind  or 
Soul  (27).  Mind  is  the  King  of  all  things  good  (28).  The 
Whole  is  a  Cosmos  or  Body,  the  Universal  Organism,  with  a 
Soul  which  rules  it.  “In  the  universe  there  is  a  mighty  infinite 
and  a  sufficient  limit  and  a  no  mean  cause  which  orders  and 
arranges  years  and  seasons  and  months  and  may  most  justly  be 
called  reason  and  mind”  (30).  There  are  four  classes  of  ex- 
istents — the  Infinite  (so  Jowett  translates  a-rreipov,  it  would 
better  be  called  the  Unlimited  or  Indefinite),  the  Finite  (or 
Limit),  the  Mixed  (compounded  of  the  two  first),  and  the  Cause 
of  the  Mixture  (23  et  al).  The  Infinite  is  Matter,  the  Finite 
is  Form,  Actual  Individuals  and  Particulars  are  the  union  of  the 
two,  and  Mind  is  the  Cause  of  the  union.  In  this  dialogue  Plato 
clearly  seems  to  identify  the  Cosmic  Mind  with  God,  to  regard 
the  latter  as  the  Universal  Soul,  and  the  Author  or  Creator  of 
all  order,  symmetry,  beauty,  and  harmony  in  the  universe,  but 
he  does  not  withdraw  the  doctrine  elsewhere  advanced  that  the 
Idea  of  the  Good  is  above  God,  being  the  form  or  pattern  by 


PLATO 


123 


which  he  fashions  the  world.  Perhaps  Plato  meant  that  God  is 
identical  with  the  Idea  of  the  Good.  But  this  is  too  large  a 
question  to  be  discussed  here  ( cf .  the  Republic  and  Tinueus). 

Pleasures  and  pains  belong  to  a  mixed  class.  Pleasure  is  a 
harmonious  mixture;  pain  is  the  destruction  of  a  symmetrical 
union  of  the  finite  and  infinite  (31-32).  From  33  to  53  there  is 
an  elaborate  discussion  of  various  kinds  of  pleasures  and  pains; 
the  chief  conclusions  are :  that  there  are  false  pleasures,  that 
pleasures  and  pains  are  relative,  that  the  most  intense  or  violent 
pleasures  belong  to  diseased  states  of  the  organism,  and  finally, 
that  the  purest  pleasures  are  those  of  knowledge.  The  latter 
conclusion  leads  (end  of  53)  to  the  proposition  that  pleasure,  be¬ 
longing  as  it  does  to  the  realm  of  the  changing  and  the  many  (of 
generation),  has  instrumental  Value;  it  exists  for  the  sake  of 
Essence.  This  is  the  realm  of  eternal  being,  of  the  Good-in- 
Itself,  of  Intrinsic  Value  (54).  In  54-59  the  field  of  knowledge 
is  divided  into  instrumental  or  technical  knowledge  and  the  con¬ 
templative  insight  into  true  being  or  reality.  The  only  knowledge 
which  has  intrinsic  value  is  that  which  yields  to  the  soul  some 
glimpse  of  Eternal  Being.  From  60  to  the  end  there  is  a  resume 
of  the  argument.  The  life  of  true  happiness  consists  in  the 
interfusion  of  the  sensuous  by  the  spiritual,  the  temporal  by  the 
eternal,  under  the  guidance  of  the  ruling  principles  of  Beauty, 
Symmetry,  and  Truth.  In  the  good  life,  and  in  the  Cosmos, 
the  first  is  Measure,  the  second  is  Symmetry,  the  third  is  Mind 
or  Wisdom,  the  fourth  is  Science,  the  fifth  the  Pure  Pleasures 
of  the  Soul,  and  there  is  no  sixth.  Thus  the  Philebus  empha¬ 
sizes  symmetry  and  harmony ,  or  order  and  proportion,  as  being 
both  the  principle  of  the  Good,  and  the  ruling  principle  in  the 
universe;  the  one,  in  fact,  because  the  other,  since  the  Good  or 
Mind  is  the  First  and  Final  Cause  of  existence.  Less  imagina¬ 
tive  and  artistic  than  most  of  the  other  dialogues  of  Plato,  the 
Philebus  is  very  important,  since  it  expounds  the  central  prin¬ 
ciples  of  his  matured  doctrine  of  reality. 

In  the  Sophist  Plato  argues  explicitly  that  the  Ideas  con¬ 
stitute  a  system.  There  are  certain  fundamental  ideas  or  cate¬ 
gories  which  are  involved  in  all  others — such  are  Unity  and 
Plurality,  Identity  and  Difference  (Sameness  and  Otherness), 
Rest  and  Motion,  Being  and  Nonbeing.  (These  imply  one  an¬ 
other.)  The  Universals  are  in  communion  with  one  another. 
Not  all  things  have  communion  with  all,  but  some  with  some 
(251).  In  short,  One  and  Many,  Rest  and  Motion,  Sameness 


124 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


and  Otherness,  and  even  Being  and  Nonbeing,  imply  each  other. 

Being  is  defined  as  Power,  Life,  Mind  (247  and  248).  “And, 
heavens,  can  we  ever  be  made  to  believe  that  motion  and  life 
and  soul  and  mind  are  not  present  with  absolute  being?  Can  we 
imagine  being  to  be  devoid  of  life  and  mind  and  to  remain  in 
awful  unmeaningness  an  everlasting  fixture?”  (249).  Thus  the 
most  significant  thoughts  in  the  Sophist  are  that  Ideas  are  spir¬ 
itual  powers,  that  mind  is  dynamic,  and  that  there  is  a  unity  or 
system  of  the  Ideas.  The  ultimate  realities  are  not  a  pluralistic 
aggregate.  They  are  an  organized  totality.  The  Philebus  and 
the  Sophist  are  somewhat  abstruse  and  difficult  dialogues  to  fol¬ 
low.  The  style  is  technical  and  dry.  The  student  would  better 
omit  them  on  a  first  reading  of  Plato  and  come  back  to  them  after 
having  studied  carefully  the  dialogues  previously  touched  upon. 

The  Tim ceiis  is  Plato’s  mythical  or  poetical  story  of  crea¬ 
tion.  It  calls  for  no  special  comment,  beyond  attention  to  the 
fact  that  Plato  seems  here  to  be  giving  an  imaginative  account 
of  things  beyond  the  reach  of  science.  His  insistence  that  the 
cause  of  the  world’s  existence  was  the  goodness  or  love  of  the 
Creator,  which  led  him  to  desire  that  all  things  should  be  as  like 
him  as  possible,  seems  to  indicate  that  he  identifies  the  Idea  of 
the  Good  (the  supreme  idea  in  the  Republic)  with  the  Creative 
Ground  of  the  world.  We  find  here  the  distinction  between 
three  kinds  of  being:  (1)  The  Eternal  Essences  or  Ideas ;  (2) 
Sensible  Things,  the  empirical  world  of  sense  perception ;  and 
(3)  Pure  Space.  The  actual  world  is  due  to  the  union  of  these 
three  kinds  of  being.  The  creator  put  intelligence  in  soul  and 
soul  in  body.  The  soul  is  made  of  three  elements:  (1)  The 
unchangeable  essence  or  Idea;  (2)  the  changeable  or  corporeal; 
(3)  an  intermediate  essence. 

References 

Adam,  James,  Vitality  of  Platonism. 

*  Avey,  Albert  E.,  Readings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  VII. 

*  Burnet,  John,  History  of  Greek  Philosophy,  pp.  205-350. 
Campbell,  Lewis,  Introductions  to  the  Sophist  and  Politicus. 
Dunning,  William  A.,  History  of  Political  Theories,  Ancient 

and  Modern,  1-48. 

*  Encyclopedia  Britannica,  11th  ed.,  Article  “Plato.” 

Grote,  George,  Plato  and  the  Other  Companions  of  Socrates. 


PLATO  125 

Lutoslawski,  Wincenty,  The  Origin  and  Growth  of  Plato’s 
Logic. 

*  MacKenzie,  J.  S.,  Outlines  of  Social  Philosophy,  pp.  89-90 

and  259-274. 

*  More,  Paul  Elmer,  Platonism  and  The  Religion  of  Plato. 
Nettleship,  R.  Lewis,  Lectures  on  the  Republic,  and  Theory  of 

Education  in  Plato’s  Republic  (in  Hellenica) . 

Pater,  Walter,  Plato  and  Platonism. 

*  Plato,  Dialogues,  translation  by  Jowett,  especially  Meno,  Gor- 

gias,  Protagoras,  Symposium,  Phaedrus,  Theactetus,  Phaedo, 
Philebus,  Sophist,  Politicus,  Parmenides,  Republic,  Timacus, 
and  Laws. 

The  Republic,  translation  by  Davies  and  Vaughan. 

*  Histories  of  Philosophy  previously  cited. 

*  Ritchie,  David  G.,  Plato . 

Stewart,  J.  A.,  Plato’s  Doctrine  of  Ideas,  and  Myths  of  Plato. 
Shorey,  Paul,  The  Unity  of  Plato’s  Thought 

*  Taylor,  A.  E.,  Plato. 

WlNDELBAND,  WlLHELM,  Platon. 

Zeller,  Edward,  Plato. 


CHAPTER  VIII 


ARISTOTLE  (384-322  B.  c.) 

Plato  had  a  large  school  called  the  Academy.  Of  that 
school  Aristotle  was  the  ablest  member,  and  he  in  turn 
later  established  the  Lyceum,  an  institution  which  became 
the  most  important  center  of  learning  in  the  ancient  world 
after  Plato’s  demise.  Aristotle  was  a  tutor  of  Alexander 
the  Great,  and  it  is  supposed  that  Aristotle  got  money  for 
his  school  from  Alexander.  Aristotle  made  great  collec¬ 
tions  in  the  departments  of  botany,  zoology  and  other  fields 
of  science.  While  Plato  was  a  man  of  poetic  inspiration 
and  great  speculative  insight,  Aristotle  was  a  great  intel- 
tectual  organizer.  He  systematized  and  developed  the  doc¬ 
trines  of  Plato.  His  great  aim  was  to  transform  the 
Socratic-Platonic  philosophy  into  an  organized  body  of 
theory  that  would  systematize  and  interpret  the  world  of 
experience.  Aristotle’s  greatest  achievement  consists  in 
the  methodizing  or  ordering  of  science.  He  analyzes  and 
classifies  his  materials,  separates  and  formulates  the  prob¬ 
lems,  and  coordinates  the  results  into  a  coherent  whole. 
His  logic  has  remained  the  basis  of  logic  to  the  present  time, 
and  his  ethics  is  still  full  of  sound  instruction.  He  wrote 
on  politics,  anatomy,  botany,  and  poetics.  He  also  wrote 
treatises  on  metaphysics,  or  the  first  principles  of  reality, 
and  psychology,  which  are  still  very  important. 

I.  Aristotle’s  Logic 

Aristotle  was  the  first  to  organize  into  a  coherent  body 
of  doctrine  the  various  outcomes  of  logical  investigation 

126 


ARISTOTLE 


127 


on  the  part  of  his  predecessors.  Some  of  the  most  funda¬ 
mental  principles  of  logic,  such  as  the  principle  of  contra¬ 
diction,  the  principle  of  sufficient  reason,  the  dictum  con¬ 
cerning  all  and  none  ( dictum  cle  omni  et  nullo)  and  others, 
had  been  already  formulated.  What  Aristotle  did  was  to 
weave  all  the  logical  principles  and  rules  into  a  coherent 
whole  and  to  formulate  a  system  of  deductive  logic  or  logic 
of  proof  that  has,  in  the  main,  stood  until  the  present. 

Aristotle  regards  logic  as  the  theory  of  scientific  method ; 
that  is,  as  the  formulation  of  the  systematic  procedure  of 
the  intellect,  by  which  it  apprehends  particulars  in  the 
light  of  universals  or  concepts.  Logical  thinking  is  the 
organon  or  instrument  by  which  truth  is  reached.  The  two 
chief  divisions  of  this  organon  are  the  Analytics  and  the 
Topics.  The  Topics  is  devoted  to  the  consideration  of 
induction  or  Dialectic,  which  ascends  from  particular 
facts  of  experience  to  the  universal  propositions  that  ex¬ 
plain  the  particulars ;  induction  is  a  method  of  research 
which  attains  to  only  probable  conclusions ;  the  degree  of 
certainty  of  these  increase,  however,  in  so  far  as  they 
explain  particular  phenomena ;  in  the  special  sciences  only 
relative  universality  is  attainable.  We  shall  give  no  further 
space  to  his  treatment  of  induction,  since  it  does  not  com¬ 
pare  in  value  with  his  theory  of  deduction,  which  is 
expounded  in  the  Analytics. 

All  scientific  knowledge,  according  to  Aristotle,  consists 
in  the  subsumption  of  particulars  under  class  concepts  or 
universals,  and  in  the  combination  of  concepts  into  a  sys¬ 
tem.  Deductive  Logic  is  the  theory  of  proof  or  inference 
by  which,  starting  from  given  propositions,  we  may  reach 
conclusions  that  are  absolutely  certain.  A  correct  syllo¬ 
gism  is  an  inference  from  a  combination  of  concepts.  A 
proposition  consists  of  two  terms,  subject  and  predicate, 
and  the  relation  between  them ;  for  example,  S  is  P,  or 
S  is  not  P.  Propositions  may  be  either  affirmative  or 


128 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


negative  in  quality ,  as  in  the  above  examples ;  they  may  be 
either  universal  or  particular  in  the  quantity  of  the  terms ; 
for  example,  all  S  is  P,  and  no  S  is  P,  are  both  uni¬ 
versal,  some  S  is  P  and  some  S  is  not  P,  are  both  par¬ 
ticular,  with  reference  to  the  quantity  or  extension  of  S. 
In  order  that,  by  a  combination  of  two  propositions,  a 
third  may  be  inferred  with  certainty,  there  must  be  a 
universal  which  is  shared  in  common  by  the  two  proposi¬ 
tions  which  constitute  the  premises.  The  term  for  the 
common  universal  concept  is  the  middle  or  mediating  term 
designated  by  the  letter  M.  Thus — All  M  is  P,  All  S  is  M; 
therefore,  All  S  is  P ;  or  All  living  beings  are  mortal,  All 
men  are  living  beings,  .  * .  All  men  are  mortal ; — are  exam¬ 
ples  of  the  syllogism. 

Aristotle  enumerated  and  gave  rules  for  correct  infer¬ 
ence  in  three  figures  of  the  syllogism ;  the  figure  being  the 
combination  of  terms  in  the  premises  which  depends  on 
the  position  of  M.  These  are 

M  —  P  P  —  M  M  —  P 

S  —  M  S  —  M  M  —  S 

S  — P  S  — P  S  — P 

Later  logicians  added  the  fourth  figure,  which  is  the  re¬ 
verse  of  the  first.  It  will  be  obvious  that  the  quantity  and 
quality  of  the  propositions  inferable  from  the  given  pre¬ 
mises,  depend  upon  the  special  combination  of  terms  in  the 
various  figures.  The  first  figure  is  the  perfect  one,  since 
one  can  infer  all  four  kinds  of  propositions  by  it. 

Syllogism  for  Aristotle  is  not  merely  deductive ;  it  is  a 
means  of  induction.  Beginning  with  particular  possible 
or  probable  conclusions  in  the  imperfect  figures,  we  may, 
with  increase  of  insight,  proceed  to  universal  affirmative 
conclusions  in  the  first  figure. 

Aristotle  held  that  scientific  knowledge  involves :  (1)  par¬ 
ticular  data  to  be  investigated ;  2,  certain  essential  or  uni- 


ARISTOTLE 


129 


versal  properties  in  the  data;  and  (3)  certain  general  prin¬ 
ciples  of  all  reasoning.  The  latter  are  presupposed  in  all 
science ;  we  come  gradually,  through  reflection,  to  a  knowl¬ 
edge  of  them ;  thus  our  knowledge  here,  as  everywhere, 
depends  upon  the  intellectual  development  of  our  experi¬ 
ence.  But  the  first  principles  of  reasoning,  when  we  become 
aware  of  them,  are  recognized  as  axiomatic  or  self-evident. 
They  are,  the  law  of  contradiction  (A  cannot  be  both  B 
and  not  B),  and  the  law  of  the  excluded  middle  (A  must 
be  either  B  or  not  B).  In  special  fields,  such  as  geometry, 
there  are  special  axioms ;  for  example,  in  regard  to  space 
relations,  Aristotle  held  that,  while  it  is  through  experience 
that  we  become  aware  of  universal  propositions,  the  high¬ 
est  universals  are  presupposed  in  the  possibility  of  our 
understanding  experience.  There  could  be  no  science  were 
not  the  highest  universals  first  in  order  of  being,  although 
last  in  the  order  of  the  psychological  growth  of  knowledge 
in  the  individual  mind. 

The  beginning  and  the  goal  of  science  is  definition.  We 
must  begin  with  tentative  universals,  with  propositions 
which  define  the  terms  whose  content  we  are  investigating. 
The  goal  of  science  is  a  definition  wdiich  explains  the 
nature  of  the  subject  by  its  essential  properties  and  by  the 
differentiating  properties  by  which  it  is  marked  off  from 
other  groups.  Thus  the  final  goal  of  science  would  be  a 
complete  classification  of  objects  of  knowledge  into  class 
groups,  exhibiting  all  the  resemblances  and  differences  in 
the  properties  of  the  various  classes.  And  the  beginning 
of  science  is  made  with  those  empirical  and  tentative  classi¬ 
fications  which  common  sense  makes.  We  might,  for  exam¬ 
ple,  begin  an  investigation  of  man’s  place  in  the  universe 
with  the  tentative  definition,  “Man  is  a  two-legged  erect 
animal  who  uses  speech  and  invents  tools.”  The  goal  of 
the  science  of  anthropology  would  be  a  complete  grasp  of 
man’s  relations  to  all  other  classes  of  beings.  This  con- 


130 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


ception  of  science  was  clearly  formulated  by  Aristotle. 
He  says  that  the  definition  of  a  term  or  a  class  concept 
must  be  :  (1)  a  complete  statement  of  the  essential  attributes 
of  the  class,  for  example,  man  is  an  animal  with  powers 
of  rational  speech;  (2)  the  peculiar  attributes  of  the  class, 
for  example,  man  is  capable  of  laughter ;  (3)  the  next  higher 
genus,  for  example,  man  is  an  animal;  (4)  the  properties 
which  differentiate  man  from  all  other  animal  species,  for 
example,  man  is  capable  of  speech;  (5)  accidents,  that  is, 
properties  not  part  of  definition  but  common  to  the  class 
and  other  classes,  for  example,  man  is  a  material  object. 

II.  Aristotle’s  Theory  of  Realitty — ( Metaphysics ) 

Aristotle  accepts  the  Platonic  conception  of  knowledge, 
that  is,  knowledge  comes  only  through  universal,  concepts, 
forms.  Yet  Aristotle  thinks  that  Plato  erred  in  separating 
the  universals  from  the  particulars.  Aristotle ’s  fundamen¬ 
tal  doctrine  is  that  the  Supersensible  Realm  of  Ideas  or 
Forms  is  in  and  one  with  the  realm  of  sensuous  existence. 
He  agrees  with  Plato  that  the  task  of  science  and  phi¬ 
losophy  is  the  deduction  or  derivation  of  particular  facts 
from  universal  principles  or  laws ;  and,  thus,  that  all  knowl¬ 
edge  consists  in  seeing  and  interpreting  the  particular, 
sensible  datum  in  the  light  of  the  universal  or  concept.  The 
following  scheme  illustrates  Aristotle  s  conception  of 

reality. 

The  individual  being  (evisXex^101) 


Matter  (§uva|nc)  Form  (evepyeia) 

The  individual  is  the  union  of  matter  and  form,  or  the 
passing  of  potency  into  actuality. 


ARISTOTLE 


131 


By  matter  Aristotle  means  the  potentiality  of  forms. 
There  is  one  pure  form,  namely,  God.  There  is  no  matter 
in  God.  ’EvreAc/eia  is  that  which  is  the  fulfillment  of  an 
end.  Thus  we  see  that  Aristotle  has  a  teleological  concep¬ 
tion  of  nature. 

Auva|jic  or  matter  is  the  possibility  of  being  an  indi- 
"v  idual,  v  hile  the  form  is  the  shaping,  the  organizing,  the 
dynamic  principle.  For  Plato,  the  ultimately  real  world 
is  the  lealm  of  eternal  forms.  Aristotle,  however,  main¬ 
tains  that  reality  is  a  development  of  individuals  through 
the  immanent,  indwelling  force  of  the  forms.  The  uni- 
■\  ersals  do  not  exist  apart  from  the  particulars ;  they  exist 
only  in  the  individuals.  The  formative  principles,  there¬ 
fore,  aie  immanent,  not  transcendent.  We  may  illustrate 
this  doctrine  as  follows:  We  say  the  child  is  father  to  the 
man.  We  mean  by  this  that  the  possibility  of  the  states¬ 
man,  poet,  or  artisan,  is  in  the  child,  and  the  realization 
of  that  possibility  is  the  coming  into  being  of  the  individual 
man.  The  oak  tree  is  the  realization  of  the  matter  or  poten¬ 
tiality  latent  in  the  acorn.  Thus  throughout  nature  there 
are  operative  purposive  entities,  and  the  realization  of  the 
end  is  always  due  to  the  activity  of  the  form  in  the  matter. 
Thus,  too,  whether  any  individual  is  to  be  regarded  as 
matter  or  form  depends  on  whether  one  is  considering  it 
in  relation  to  stages  of  existence  below  or  above  it  in  the 
whole  scale  of  existence.  A  baby  is  form  in  relation  to  an 
ovum  which  is  its  matter;  but  the  baby  is  matter  in  rela¬ 
tion  to  a  youth  which  is  its  realized  form ;  in  turn  the 
}  outh  is  the  matter  of  a  statesman ,  poet,  or  artisan ;  and 
the  latter  are  realized  forms. 


Aristotle  criticizes  Plato  on  the  ground  that  he  separated 
ideas  from  the  sense  world.1  Aristotle  himself  seeks  to 
make  ideas  the  immanent,  indwelling  or  shaping  princi- 


i  It  is  a  debatable  question  whether,  on  this  score,  Aristotle’s 
terpretation  of  Plato  is  justifiable.  I  doubt  it. 


in- 


132 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


pies  in  the  world  of  sense  experience,  and  he  develops  this 
view  as  follows:  matter,  he  maintains,  is  the  potentiality 
or  the  possibility  of  form.  Matter  does  exist,  but  not  by 
itself.  Matter  is  not  nonbeing  or  absence  of  being  as  Plato 
seems,  according  to  some  of  his  expressions,  to  have  held. 
Matter  is  a  positive  existence.  It  is  the  “promise  and  po¬ 
tency’  ’  of  all  individuality.  It  is  actuality  in  the  making, 
and  subservient  to  the  formative  and  dynamic  purposes 
which  are  the  animating  powers  of  reality.  There  is  no 
such  thing  as  formless  matter,  a  primeval  stuff  which  is 
pure  chaos.  The  notion  of  pure  matter  is  for  Aristotle  a 
limiting  concept.  Matter  which  is  to  some  degree  shaped 
by  forms  is  what  actually  exists.  Thus  his  conception  of 
matter  represents  an  advance  over  the  view  of  Plato.  The 
forms  or  universals  of  Aristotle  are  called  entelechies.  They 
are  the  realization  of  the  possibilities  of  matter  to  be 
formed.  Reality,  what  is  real,  is  the  individual.  There  is 
no  such  thing  as  either  pure  matter  or  pure  form  except  in 
the  case  of  God,  who  is  pure  form — Form  of  Forms. 

The  world  is  a  system  of  development  in  which  there  are 
an  indefinite  number  of  stages  or  levels.  On  the  lowest 
level  we  have  an  individual  that  has  the  fewest  forms  em¬ 
bodied  in  itself,  for  example,  clay.  This  lump  of  clay  may 
be  taken  by  the  sculptor  and  shaped  into  the  figure  of  an 
Apollo  Belvedere,  or  a  Venus  de  Milo.  Then  the  lump  of 
clay,  under  the  guiding  mind  of  the  sculptor,  becomes  the 
embodiment  of  the  Greek  ideas  of  manly  and  feminine 
beauty.  Into  the  making  of  any  individual,  according  to 
Aristotle,  there  enter  two  causes,  the  material  cause  and 
the  formal  cause.  The  material  cause  of  the  statue  is  the 
clay  or  the  marble,  the  stuff  out  of  which  the  individual  is 
shaped.  The  final  cause  is  the  purpose  or  idea.  In  a  broad 
sense,  the  final  clause  is  identical  with  the  formal  cause. 
For  the  end  is  the  expression  of  the  form.  There  are  three 
phases  or  aspects  of  the  formal  cause : 


ARISTOTLE 


133 


1.  The  end — tIXoc,  :  the  manifestation  of  beauty. 

2.  The  formal  cause,  that  is,  the  shape  the  individual 
takes  in  the  mind  of  the  sculptor. 

3.  The  efficient  cause,  the  instrument  by  which  the  end 
is  realized. 

Thus  the  formal  cause  is  a  dynamic,  purposive  principle. 
The  true  nature  of  anything  is  revealed  in  its  end.  Nature, 
as  a  whole,  is  a  system  of  ends,  a  hierarchy  of  ascending 
values.  Thus,  to  the  mechanical  nature  philosophy  of  the 
atomists,  Aristotle  opposes  a  dynamic  and  teleological  and 
vitalistic  nature  philosophy.  For  him,  qualitative  distinc¬ 
tions  of  value  and  meaning  in  nature  cannot  be  reduced  to 
quantitative  differences  between  the  masses,  figures,  and 
spatial  configurations  of  atoms.  Aristotle’s  individualized 
forms  are  qualitatively  different  centers  of  purposive 
energy,  which  determine  the  course  of  reality. 

The  idea  of  artistic  creation  was  very  influential  with 
Plato  and  Aristotle.  They  were  both  Greeks,  and  these 
above  all  other  peoples  were  endowed  with  a  high  order  of 
artistic  powers  and  appreciation. 

Aristotle’s  interpretation  of  nature  is  both  humanistic 
and  artistic.  His  Philosophy  of  Nature  is  what  may  be 
called  an  artistic  teleology,  that  is,  he  gives  us  an  inter¬ 
pretation  of  the  processes  of  nature  in  terms  of  artistic 
purpose.  God  is  a  cosmic  artist.  Among  all  the  natural 
sciences,  biology  is  the  one  which  interested  Aristotle  most. 
His  conception  of  the  relation  of  life  and  matter  is  teleo¬ 
logical  and  artistic.  This  comes  out  clearly  in  Aristotle’s 
conception  of  the  soul  and  its  relation  to  the  body. 

III.  Aristotle’s  Psychology 

The  soul  is  the  entelechy,  the  principle  of  life  which 
shapes  the  body  to  its  ends.  Only  potential  life  belongs 
to  bodies.  Actual  life  is  due  to  the  influence  of  the  soul, 


134 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


the  body  is  the  instrument  of  the  soul.  The  actuality  of  the 
body  is  derived  from  the  soul.  Aristotle  distinguished  be¬ 
tween  three  levels  in  the  soul: 

1.  Nutritive  soul:  This  is  the  principle  of  life  and  repro¬ 
duction,  and  is  common  to  all  plants  and  animals. 

2.  Sensitive  soul:  This  is  common  to  all  animals.  It 
is  the  soul  which  has  sensation  and  feeling.  Aristotle  thinks 
that  plants  do  not  have  sensation.  Among  the  senses,  he 
makes  touch  fundamental  and  the  source  of  all  the  others. 

3.  Rational  soul:  Through  this  soul  knowledge  and  re¬ 
flection  come. 

In  man  these  three  interact.  Reason  gets  all  of  its  material 
through  the  senses  and  the  imagination.  At  this  point 
Aristotle  gives  us  a  psychology  of  knowledge,  which  we  did 
not  get  in  Plato.  While  the  materials  come  from  sensation, 
the  separate  senses  have  not  the  power  of  discriminating 
and  reasoning.  Both  the  analysis  and  synthesis,  by  which 
knowledge  is  built  up  out  of  sensation,  are  functions  of 
ncnis  (vouc)  or  thought. 

Aristotle  is  the  first  to  definitely  formulate  a  theory  of 
the  nature,  structure,  and  function  of  the  judgment.  So 
far  as  the  rational  soul  is  influenced  by  the  lower  grades, 
it  is  relatively  passive.  But  reason  itself  is  active,  creative, 
synthetic,  and  its  activity  enters  into  all  true  knowledge, 
and  true  knowledge  consists  in  knowledge  of  the  universal 
concepts.  In  the  act  of  knowing,  which  is  always  judg¬ 
ment,  whether  it  be  of  sense  perception,  memory,  or  infer¬ 
ence,  the  mind  is  one  with  what  it  knows.  Thus  the  objects 
of  sense  perception  are,  in  the  moment  of  perception,  iden¬ 
tical  with  the  process  of  perception ;  and,  in  the  absence 
of  the  latter,  exist  potentially. 

Reason  is  pure  activity,  whose  work  is  guided  by  the  laws 
of  thought.  Aristotle  holds  that,  while  our  knowledge  of 
the  world  is  derived  from  the  senses,  yet  there  is  no  knowl- 


ARISTOTLE  135 

edge  except  in  so  far  as  the  materials  of  sense  are  judged 
by  reason. 

IV.  Aristotle’s  Theory  of  Knowledge 

In  the  moment  of  knowing,  mind  is  one  with  the  object 
known.  The  knowing  process  is  one  with  what  it  knows. 
Aristotle’s  theory  of  knowledge  is  monistic.  The  mind 
knows  reality  in  its  very  nature  or  essence,  not  a  mere  copy 
or  shadow  of  reality.  In  true  knowledge,  the  apprehending 
mind  and  the  apprehended  object  come  immediately  to 
grips  with  one  another.  This  view  of  knowledge  is  to  be 
contrasted  with  all  theories  of  dualism.  Dualistie  theories 
maintain  that  in  knowledge  we  deal  with  symbols  or  copies, 
and  not  with  the  object  directly.  In  Aristotle  we  have  the 
realistic  position — mind  knows  the  objects  as  they  really 
are — which  is  opposed  to  phenomenalism.  In  phenomenal¬ 
ism  the  mind  is  said  to  know  appearances,  symbols,  copies 
of  things,  and  not  things  as  they  are.  In  Aristotle  we  have 
this,  one  of  the  most  persistent  of  philosophical  problems, 
explicitly  formulated.  In  this  realistic  position,  mind  and 
object  known  are  held  to  be  one  in  the  moment  of  knowing. 

All  forms  of  phenomenalism  agree  in  saying  that  mind 
knows  only  appearances.  There  are,  to  be  sure,  several 
types  of  phenomenalistic  theories.  These  types  range  from 
those  which  insist  that  the  knowledge  copies  are  fairly  good 
copies,  to  those  views  which  urge  that  through  our  copies 
we  get  to  know  nothing  whatever  about  the  object.  Realism 
denies  that  knowledge  is  concerned  with  copies.  It  rests 
directly  upon  the  assumption  that,  for  example,  in  the 
moment  of  my  perceiving  this  desk,  there  is  no  real  dis¬ 
tinction  between  my  perceiving  and  what  I  perceive. 

Aristotle  held  that  sense  perception  is  a  genuine  source 
of  knowledge,  and  that  the  reason  is  dependent  on  percep- 


136 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


tion  for  its  knowledge  of  objects  in  nature.  There  is  a 
gradual  transition  from  sense  perception  to  rational 
thought.  In  the  lowest  stage  there  is  direct  perception  of 
objects ;  after  this  there  comes  the  process  of  forming 
images,  and  then  the  forming  of  conceptions;  but  in  all 
this  reason  is  active.  To  illustrate  this  point,  suppose  that 
you  visit  some  strange  region  never  before  visited  by  man, 
and  in  that  region  you  see  unfamiliar  animals.  You  begin 
to  gain  control  of  the  situation  by  classifying  the  animals 
in  question,  and  you  form  images  and  class  concepts  into 
which  the  objects  fall,  and  then  you  make  a  definition  of 
the  class  thus  discovered.  It  is  in  the  formation  of  the 
definition  that  the  mind  is  most  active,  and  it  is  upon  the 
basis  of  such  definitions  that  the  reason  can  further  work 
deductively.  This  threefold  process  eventuates  in  scien¬ 
tific  knowledge  only  through  the  unifying  power  of  the 
reason.  It  is  through  this  power  that  all  our  concepts  are 
synthesized  into  a  well  articulated  system,  and  this  takes 
place  under  the  guidance  of  the  first  principles  of  thought. 
These  first  principles  we  intuitively  perceive,  and  while 
they  do  not  have  their  origin  in  sensory  experience,  they 
do  have  application  in  experience ;  that  is,  these  first  prin¬ 
ciples  are  not  of  experience,  but  their  application  in  experi¬ 
ence  yields  scientific  knowledge. 

Aristotle’s  theory  of  knowledge  is  more  carefully  elab¬ 
orated  and  systematized  than  Plato’s.  He  also  pays  more 
attention  to  the  psychological  process  by  which  knowledge 
is  constructed.  It  is  often  said  that  Aristotle  is  an  empiri¬ 
cist.  This  is  not  true,  although  it  is  true  that  he  gave  far 
more  consideration  to  empirical  data  than  did  Plato.  Aris¬ 
totle  holds  positively  to  the  existence  of  intuitively  known 
principles.  For  him  all  knowledge  is  not  derived  from 
sense  perception.  The  individual  mind  is  not  purely  pas¬ 
sive.  He  differs  greatly  from  the  English  empiricists  who 


ARISTOTLE 


137 


maintain  that  the  individual  is  a  passive  organism  on  which 
the  world  writes  or  perchance  scribbles.  Rationalism  holds 
that  the  fundamental  principles  of  knowledge  are  not  de¬ 
rived  from  sense  experience.  Rationalism  need  not  deny 
that  the  senses  give  the  materials  of  knowledge.  A  ration¬ 
alist  of  the  Aristotelian  variety  does  not  excogitate  the  data 
of  perception  out  of  his  own  inner  consciousness ;  but  he 
holds  that  the  reason  is  creative,  and  it  is  the  source  of  the 
fundamental  principles  of  thought.  There  is  an  oft  for¬ 
gotten  and  withal  important  distinction  which  Aristotle 
makes  when  he  points  out  the  difference  between  priority  in 
the  psychological  order  and  that  in  the  logical  order.  Psy¬ 
chologically,  sensation  is  prior  to  conception,  that  is,  the 
child  has  sensations  before  it  has  concepts ;  it  has  particular 
experiences  before  it  has  general  ideas.  Our  scientific 
knowledge  begins  with  crude  data  and  proceeds  only  grad¬ 
ually  to  the  refined  results  given  us  in  scientific  formulae. 
By  logical  priority,  Aristotle  means  that  there  is  implied, 
or  actually  used,  universal  principles  in  the  organization 
of  our  sense  experience.  In  the  organization  of  sense  expe¬ 
rience  into  science  the  mind  uses  these  fundamental  prin¬ 
ciples,  even  though  it  may  never  know  what  these  principles 
are.  In  short,  Aristotle  is  a  rationalist  who  gives  experi¬ 
ence  its  due ;  a  realist,  with  respect  to  the  relation  of  knowl¬ 
edge  and  reality,  whose  realism  rests  upon  the  metaphysical 
doctrine  that  the  structure  of  the  world  is  determined  and 
controlled  by  intelligible  Forms,  Ideas,  or  Ideals,  and 
Values.  Reality  for  him  is  a  process  in  which  Form  or 
Meaning  and  Value,  is  forever  taking  on  more  and  fuller 
individuality.  And,  notwithstanding  their  difference  in 
temperament  and  method,  Aristotle  is  really  carrying  out, 
in  more  systematic  fashion,  the  fundamental  insights  of 
Plato.  Their  basic  harmony  of  view  is  deeper  than  even 
Aristotle  saw. 


138 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


V.  Summary  of  Aristotle’s  Theory  of  Reality 

Aristotle ’s  conception  of  reality  is  that  of  an  endless  pro¬ 
cession  of  passing  from  potentiality  to  actuality,  or,  from 
the  formless  to  the  formed.  Forms  are  the  dynamic  prin¬ 
ciples  that  operate  in  the  natural  order.  All  individual 
beings,  from  the  simplest  crystal  to  the  very  highest  indi¬ 
vidual,  are  the  results  of  the  operation  of  the  entelechies  or 
formative  principles  in  nature.  Reality  is  the  constant  pro¬ 
cess  of  the  actualization  of  forms. 

Nothing  in  the  natural  world  is  created  all  at  once. 
Everything  develops,  grows.  Broadly  speaking,  therefore, 
Aristotle’s  philosophy  is  that  reality  is  an  evolution.  It  is 
an  evolution  towards  progressively  higher  types  of  individ¬ 
uality.  It  is  a  teleological  evolution  including  in  its  pur¬ 
posiveness  a  realization  of  a  multitude  of  purposes  or  ends. 
Such  a  conception  of  nature  implies  that  the  all-inclusive 
purpose  is  operative  through  all  the  stages  of  the  process. 
In  other  words,  such  a  theory  implies  that,  while  the  pur¬ 
pose  of  the  whole  is  realized  in  time,  this  purpose  must  be 
eternally  existent.  There  must  be  a  form  of  forms,  a  pure 
and  all-inclusive  form,  free  from  any  admixture  of  matter ; 
and  this  form  of  forms  must  be  presupposed  in  order  to 
account  for  the  process,  and  indeed,  for  any  stage  of  the 
process.  This  form  of  forms,  this  eternal  purpose,  this 
universal  mover,  is  God.  He  is  the  source  of  all  movement, 
of  all  actuality. 

Matter  has  a  contingent,  irrational  character.  It  is  not 
wholly  subservient  to  the  realization  of  form  and  purposive 
reality,  and  it  is  this  character  that  matter  has  which  is 
the  cause  of  all  failure  in  nature.  God  is  the  final  cause, 
and  as  the  final  cause,  he  is  the  eternally  first  cause  of  all 
movement.  He  is  eternal,  being  without  parts  or  passion, 
and  unmoved  by  the  phantasmagoria  of  the  world  of  sense. 
He  is  pure  thought,  pure  activity — pure  thought  unham- 


ARISTOTLE 


139 


pered  by  any  admixture  of  sense.  He  is  the  eternally  tire¬ 
less,  active  thought  of  the  universe.  As  to  why  there  is  one 
and  not  a  plurality  of  gods,  Aristotle  replies  that  God  is 
one  because  the  world  is  one.  The  beauty  of  the  world,  the 
intelligent  and  harmonious  connections  of  its  parts  are  evi¬ 
dence  of  a  supreme  purpose  operative  everywhere  in  nature. 
The  splendor  of  the  stars  point  to  one  being  from  whom 
comes  all  unity,  harmony,  and  splendor  of  the  world.  This 
one  God  is  transcendent,  self-conscious  spirit,  the  eternally 
first  cause  of  all  change  and  development. 

Aristotle  believes  in  divine  providence,  but  that  God 
works  through  natural  means.  At  the  time  of  Aristotle 
there  were  two  ideas  in  Greek  religion  which  he  readily 
accepted : 

1.  Recognition  of  the  existence  of  gods, 

2.  The  divinity  of  the  stars 

As  to  how  God  acts  upon  the  world,  Aristotle  holds  that 
there  is  a  longing  of  matter  after  God.  In  matter  is  the 
desire  to  become  pure  activity.  It  is  this  longing  of  the 
world  to  become  like  God  that  is  the  immediate  cause  of 
the  whole  world  process.  God  does  not  move  the  world 
by  acting  on  it  directly.  The  world  is  moved  by  the  desire 
of  the  imperfect  to  attain  perfection,  by  the  longing  of  all 
other  individualized  forms  to  become  as  like  God,  the  pure 
Form  or  Forms,  the  Absolute  and  Perfect  Entelechy,  as 
possible.  God  is  pure  actuality,  completely  self-contained 
and  self -moving  Activity.  His  alone  is  the  pure  and  pas¬ 
sionless  delight  of  eternally  unhampered  self -contemplating 
thought.  He  does  not  strive  nor  suffer.  He  knows  no 
pain  nor  any  sorrow.  How  sharp  the  contrast  with  the 
Christian  God  who  ever  strives  and  suffers,  sorrows  and 
rejoices  with  men!  Aristotle’s  God  is  the  apotheosis  of  an 
intellectual  aristocracy,  the  God  of  Jesus,  a  humanized 
spiritual  ground  of  the  ideal  community. 


140 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


VI.  Aristotle’s  Doctrine  of  the  Good  ( Ethics ) 

The  good  of  anything,  on  the  basis  of  the  Aristotelian 
conception  of  the  Good,  consists  in  the  actualization  of  all 
the  functions  that  belong  to  that  being.  Every  type  of 
being  has  its  own  modes  of  activity,  and  it  is  the  realiza¬ 
tion  of  these  that  constitutes  the  Good.  That  which  distin¬ 
guishes  man  is  his  reason,  and  therefore,  the  Good  of  man 
is  the  activity  of  reason  unfolding  itself  in  all  the  virtues. 
When  man  exercises  his  functions  as  a  human  being,  he  is 
happy,  but  the  desired  end  of  such  functioning  is  not 
pleasure.  Pleasure  is  the  result  but  not  the  motive.  Wel¬ 
fare  is  the  energizing  of  the  soul  according  to  virtue.  No¬ 
where  in  the  whole  range  of  ethical  literature  is  there  a 
better  definition  of  the  Good  for  man.  Aristotle  does  not 
have  the  ascetic  strain  of  Plato,  at  least  not  to  anything  like 
the  same  degree.  The  body  is  not  a  prison  house  for  Aris¬ 
totle. 

Aristotle  gives  a  twofold  classification  of  the  virtues, 
namely,  practical  and  theoretical.  By  practical,  Aristotle 
means  the  fundamental  social  virtues,  and,  like  Plato,  he 
holds  that  the  good  life  can  be  realized  only  in  society: 
ethics  and  politics  for  Aristotle  are  inseparable.  This  is 
a  fundamental  truth — politics  is  nothing  but  applied  ethics. 
These  practical  virtues  are  courage,  self-control,  liberality, 
high-mindedness,  friendliness,  truthfulness,  justice,  et  cet¬ 
era,  and  each  of  these,  it  is  evident,  is  a  functional  means 
between  two  extremes.  Right  action  is,  with  respect  to  the 
satisfaction  of  the  ordinary  human  wants,  always  a  mean 
between  the  extreme  of  excess  and  the  extreme  of  defect, 
between  too  much  and  too  little.  For  example,  temperance, 
or  self-control,  consists  in  satisfying  the  bodily  appetites  in 
moderation ;  courage  is  a  mean  between  foolhardiness  and 
cowardice,  liberality  is  a  mean  between  prodigality  and  mis- 


ARISTOTLE  141 

erliness.  The  theoretical  virtues  have  to  do  with  the  exer¬ 
cise  of  thought.  Judgment  here  assumes  two  forms : 

1.  Judgment  as  to  means 

2.  Judgment  as  to  ends  or  intrinsic  values 

The  highest  virtue  of  all  is  wisdom.  Applied  to  life  as  a 
whole,  it  is  self-knowledge  and  understanding  of  things  in 
relation  to  God.  It  is  pure  contemplation.  This  is  the 
sweetest  and  best  of  all  things.  This  contemplation  of  all 
things  as  dependent  on  God — thinking  the  thoughts  of  God 
after  him — of  this  one  never  grows  tired.  When  freed 
from  the  vicissitudes  of  chance,  this  is  the  highest  delight 
of  man. 


References 

*  Aristotle,  Nichomachean  Ethics,  translations  by  Chase,  Well- 

don,  and  Peters;  especially  Books  I,  II,  V  and  VIII-X. 

*  Avey,  Albert  E.,  Readings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  VIII. 
Grant,  A.,  Aristotle. 

Grote,  George,  Aristotle. 

*  Metaphysics,  translation  by  Ross;  especially  Books  VII  or  Z 

and  XII  or  A. 

*  Politics,  by  Weldon  and  Jowett. 

*  Psychology,  by  Hammond,  Hicks  and  Wallace;  especially  Book 

II,  Chapters  2-5  and  Book  III,  Chapters  4-7. 

*  Taylor,  A.  E.,  Aristotle. 

*  Wallace,  Edwin,  Outlines  of  the  Philosophy  of  Aristotle  (for 

students  who  read  Greek). 

Zeller,  Aristotle  and  the  Peripatetics. 


CHAPTER  IX 


STOIC  PANTHEISM 

I.  The  Decline  of  Greek  Speculation 

The  spiritual  conditions  of  the  last  centuries  B.  C.  and 
the  first  centuries  A.  D.  in  Greece  and  Rome,  can  be  but 
briefly  touched  upon  here.  It  is  the  task  of  the  historian  of 
social  life  to  work  them  out  more  fully.  What  we  do  see 
is  that  there  is  an  organic  connection  of  the  problems  of 
philosophy  with  the  life  problems  of  a  people.  Philosophy 
is  a  statement  of  the  spirit  of  the  time.  The  old  city  state, 
which  was  the  social  and  political  form  of  Greek  life,  was 
passing  away  and  now  large  heterogeneous  empires,  first 
the  Macedonian,  which  split  up  into  fragments,  and  then 
the  Roman,  threatened  to  absorb  all  these  smaller  states.  As 
these  empires  grew  larger  they  presented  more  and  more 
a  confusion  of  races,  tongues,  customs,  beliefs,  and  super¬ 
stitions.  By  means  of  this  confusion,  the  morals  of  the 
city  states  were  broken  down,  and  this  was  done  on  a 
much  larger  scale  than  in  the  age  of  the  Sophists.  The 
Romans  were  a  formal,  utilitarian  people,  who  adjusted 
themselves  to  certain  grossly  practical  needs,  but  they 
were  never  able  to  adjust  themselves  to  the  finer  intel¬ 
lectual  and  spiritual  demands  without  importing  ideas. 
The  Roman  Empire  became  a  great  melting  pot  of  moral, 
practical,  and  intellectual  interests.  The  Romans  were 
not  a  speculative  people,  and  with  the  single  exception  of 
law,  they  made  no  great  creative  achievements  in  the  world 

of  thought.  This  period  is  characterized  by  the  growth  of 

142 


STOIC  PANTHEISM 


143 


an  intense  feeling  for  both  practical  guidance  and  emo¬ 
tional  consolation.  Out  of  this  developed  the  Epicurean 
and  Stoic  schools.1 

After  the  Hellenic  philosophical  efflorescence  in  Plato  and 
Aristotle,  atomism  exercised  considerable  influence  through 
its  adoption  by  the  Epicureans,  but  the  interest  of  this 
School  was  not  in  scientific  inquiry.  The  two  centers  of 
scientific  inquiry  were  the  Academy  and  the  Lyceum.  It 
is  possible  that  atomistic  philosophy  was  a  factor  in  the 
scientific  work  that  was  carried  on  after  the  time  of  Aris¬ 
totle  in  Alexandria  and  other  places.  It  is  well  known 

s 

that  in  geography  at  this  time  the  sphericity  of  the  earth 
was  taught.  The  heliocentric  theory  was  also  advanced, 
by  Aristarchus  and  others,  but  through  the  influence  of 
Aristotle  and  other  causes,  this  theory  died  out.  In  this 
period  Euclid’s  Elements  of  Geometry  was  composed. 
Archimedes  laid  the  foundation  of  mechanics,  while  in 
medicine  certain  important  discoveries  were  made. 

Experimental  science,  however,  after  flourishing  for 
several  centuries,  died  out.  It  had  made  auspicious  be¬ 
ginnings  ;  nevertheless,  although  it  had  also  achieved, 
through  the  progress  of  Greek  mathematics,  a  firm  mathe¬ 
matical  basis,  it  did  not,  until  after  the  lapse  of  over  fifteen 
hundred  years,  make  any  fruitful  application  of  the  method 
devised  by  Democritus.  The  spirit  of  independent  inquiry 
gradually  died  out.  The  old  Greek  world  of  city  states, 
with  their  keen  intellectual  atmosphere,  was  submerged 
in  the  all-devouring  imperial  Roman  world.  This  world 
of  Roman  imperialism  was  the  melting  pot  of  the  ancient 
world.  It  was  a  polyglot  world,  a  world  of  ail  sorts  of  races 
and  nationalities,  a  world  of  intellectual  and  religious 
confusion,  and  a  world  of  political  and  economic  confu- 


i  The  two  great  postulates  of  Greek  thought  are:  (a)  psycholog¬ 
ical — all  desire  the  good;  (b)  metaphysical — nature  is  good,  the 
good  is  sovereign.  For  the  Romans,  law  is  sovereign. 


144 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


sion.  It  was  largely  through  the  functioning  of  this  last 
form  of  confusion  that  the  Empire’s  disintegration  re¬ 
sulted.  There  was  no  spirit  of  individual  inquiry  to 
speak  of — the  Komans  were  neither  philosophically  nor 
scientifically  minded.  They  were  empire  builders  and 
rulers,  they  were  city  builders,  they  were  road  builders — 
in  short,  they  were  practically  minded.  They  did  not  make 
even  second-rate  contributions  of  the  creative  intelligence 
in  philosophy  or  science.  After  the  disintegration  of  the 
classical  Greek  world,  the  minds  of  men  turned  more  and 
more  to  the  questions  of  conduct  and  religion.  In  all 
ages  of  confusion,  in  periods  of  lack  of  unified  culture, 
in  epochs  where  there  is  an  absence  of  stable,  political 
and  social  life,  when  the  lives  of  local  communities  are 
merged  in  the  vast  welter  of  some  extensive  empire,  when 
the  old  religion  is  losing  its  regulative  power — in  short, 
when  the  old  traditional  life  in  all  its  diversified  forms  is 
passing  away,  there  may  be  nothing  positively  constructive 
and  able  to  replace  it.  At  such  junctures,  the  minds  of 
men  turn  from  philosophy  and  science  to  the  practical 
questions  of  the  hour.  And  so  we  have,  at  this  special 
period  under  discussion,  an  eclipse  of  the  spirit  of  phi¬ 
losophy  and  science. 

There  is  a  superficial,  optimistic  faith  as  to  progress. 
Some  think  that  progress  continues  in  a  straight  line. 
This  is  a  childish  faith.  Magnificent  Greek  culture  with 
all  its  bewitching  splendor  died  out  and  was  succeeded  by 
centuries  in  which  the  independent  thinker  never  dared 
raise  his  head  and  look  with  open  eye  at  nature  and  see 
things  as  they  are.  There  is  a  story  told  to  illustrate  this 
point.  It  is  of  an  incident  that  occurred  in  a  monastery 
about  the  year  1600.  A  monastic  student  of  astronomy 
discovered  the  spots  on  the  sun,  of  which  there  was  no 
mention  in  Aristotle.  He  was  told  by  his  master  that  if 
it  was  not  mentioned  in  Aristotle  then  the  spots  were 


STOIC  PANTHEISM 


145 


either  in  his  eyes  or  his  glasses.2  This  illustration  shows 
the  blind  obedience  to  authority  which  prevailed  through 
the  Middle  Ages. 

II.  Ethics  and  Speculative  Religion — the  Stoic 

System 

Epicureanism  is  a  doctrine  of  prudent  amiability.  It 
teaches  the  individual  the  advisability  of  avoiding  all  en¬ 
tangling  alliances.  Pleasure  is  the  only  good,  but  true 
pleasure  or  happiness  is  to  be  found,  not  in  the  pursuit 
of  the  coarse  and  violent  pleasures  of  sense  but  in  the 
equable,  moderate,  and  enduring  pleasures  of  the  mind 
and  of  friendship.  Everything  in  nature,  including  the 
soul  of  man,  is  composed  of  material  atoms  (c/.  Ch.  IV, 
Atomism).  But  the  atoms  have  spontaneity;  hence,  man 
has  free  will.  There  are  gods.  They  are  like  glorified 
men.  They  did  not  create  the  world,  and  they  do  not  care 
for  men  or  interfere  in  the  course  of  things.  They  live, 
happy  and  care  free,  in  the  interspaces  of  the  world.  Man 
need  not  worry  about  the  gods  or  the  hereafter,  for  death 
ends  all.  Let  man  live  wisely,  temperately,  justly,  in  the 
congenial  society  of  friends.  Let  him  be  guided  by  intelli¬ 
gent  self-interest,  and  avoid  giving  hostages  to  fortune. 
The  wise  man  will  eschew  public  life,  because  of  its  risks. 
This  is  a  prudent  and  enlightened  gospel  of  selfish  amia¬ 
bility.  It  did  not  appeal  to  the  nobler  feelings  and  as¬ 
pirations  in  man.  It  had  no  tonic  effect. 

The  best  forces  of  the  Roman  world  rallied  under  Stoi¬ 
cism.  Zeno,  336-264  B.  C.,  was  the  founder  of  this  School. 
He  was  followed  by  Cleanthes,  264-232 ;  Chrysippus,  232- 
204;  Panaetius,  180-110;  Seneca,  3-65  A.  D. ;  Epictetus, 
first  century,  and  Marcus  Aurelius,  121-180.  Stoicism  is 

2  This  story  is  told  of  Seheiner,  circa  1600,  who  contests  with 
Galileo  the  honor  of  having  discovered  the  sunspots. 


146 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


an  ethics  based  on  a  religions  metaphysic,  namely,  pan¬ 
theism .  Pantheism  means  the  identification  of  God  with 
the  cosmos.  God  is  the  essence  or  the  unity  of  the  cosmos. 
He  is  wholly  immanent,  the  One  in  All.  Theism  does  not 
thus  deny  the  transcendence  of  God.  The  theist  holds  that 
God  is  the  One  above  All,  the  perfect  and  transcendent 
Self,  on  whose  ceaseless  conserving  will,  nevertheless,  the 
universe  depends.  For  the  Stoic,  the  world  is  pervaded 
and  penetrated  by  one  spirit,  the  universal  Reason,  and 
this  world  reason  or  world  soul  is  interpreted  in  other 
than  idealistic  terms.  On  the  whole  the  Stoic  conceived 
this  permeating  principle  as  a  fine,  all-pervading,  fiery 
medium  or  ether,  a  sublimized  breath,  the  cosmical  pneuma. 
From  it,  all  the  elements  and  all  the  cyclic  transformations 
of  the  universe  emanate.  The  pneuma  is  present  in  all 
things,  but  it  is  present  in  a  preeminent  degree  in  man. 
Reason  is  the  germinating  principle  of  all  things,  but  in 
man  it  exists  as  self-conscious  reason.  It  is  the  universal 
logos  of  which  there  is  a  spark  in  every  man.  Man  is  an 
individual  expression  of  the  world-soul,  and  because  of 
this  he  is  capable  of  communion  with  God.  Man’s  destiny 
is  to  realize  himself  as  a  rational  individual  in  communion 
with  God.  Man  is  to  become  what  he  is  capable  of  becom¬ 
ing,  namely,  a  rational,  self-determining  spirit,  living 
wholly  in  harmony  with  the  universal  Spirit,  pneuma ,  Soul 
or  Reason.3  It  is  given  to  man  to  live  a  life  according  to 
nature.  Such  a  life  is  one  of  self-sufficiency,  of  inde¬ 
pendence  from  all  the  mutations  of  life.  It  is  a  life  of 
complete  imperturbability  of  mind.  In  such  a  life  man 
realizes  the  divine  image. 

3  In  tlie  Stoic  conception  of  God  there  is  interwoven,  without  any 
attempt  at  logical  consistency,  the  ideas  of  God  as  an  impersonal, 
necessary,  rational,  and  dynamic  soul  or  spirit  of  nature;  and  as 
a  personal  and  loving  providence  who  cares  for  the  human  indi¬ 
vidual  and,  by  his  will,  orders  all  things  for  good. 


STOIC  PANTHEISM 


147 


The  “pneuma”  in  man  and  animals  is  part  of  the  fiery 
cosmical  spirit.  The  soul  is  a  unity  whose  ruling  prin¬ 
ciple  is  reason.  The  Stoics  persistently  emphasized  the 
activity  of  mind  in  knowing.  Knowledge  arises  in  per¬ 
ception,  but  for  perception  to  become  knowledge  there 
must  be  an  active  attitude  of  mind.  The  act  of  perception 
is  the  transmission  of  the  perceived  quality  from  the  object 
to  the  mind — and  the  mind  reacts  to  this  quality. 

Thus  images  and  concepts,  or  general  ideas,  are  formed, 
by  the  mind,  from  sensations.  From  the  universal  experi¬ 
ences  of  mankind  there  are  formed,  unconsciously,  com¬ 
mon  notions;  that  is,  notions  which  are  common  to  all  per¬ 
sons  and  are  universally  true.  Our  scientific  ideas  are 
produced  consciously.  While  the  Stoics  hold  that  all 
knowledge  is  derived  from  sense  perception,  they  also  hold 
that  thought  is  the  active  and  reflective  principle,  by  means 
of  which  the  mind  lays  hold  on,  organizes,  and  generalizes 
from,  those  qualities  that  are  transmitted  to  it  from  the 
physical  objects. 

Each  act  of  perception  involves  apprehension,  katalepsis , 
the  laying  hold  of  things.  This  active  apprehension  in¬ 
volves  general  notions,  or  concepts,  or  types,  which  are  un¬ 
consciously  and  spontaneously  present  in  the  mind.  The 
mind  is  adapted  by  virtue  of  its  nature  to  grasp  truth. 
This,  the  act  of  perception,  is  one  which  involves,  on  the 
part  of  the  percipient,  a  laying  hold  on  the  object.  Iso¬ 
lated  perceptions  do  not  constitute  science.  They  must 
be  bound  together  by  reason.  And  it  was  to  characterize 
this  prerequisite  that  the  Stoics  used  the  word  “  con¬ 
science.”  For  the  Stoic,  the  highest  criterion  of  truth  is 
self -evidence,  or  the  feeling  of  certainty.  True  ideas  are 
those  which  adequately  copy  their  objects.  An  idea  will 
give  one  the  conviction  of  self -evidence,  when  it  is  clear 
and  distinct,  and  first  impressions  have  been  verified  by 


148 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


repetition.  The  Stoics  emphasized,  also,  the  importance 
of  correct  inference  and  paid  a  good  deal  of  attention  to 
formal  logic. 

Reason  is  the  highest  quality  in  man;  it  is  the  divine 
spark.  Reason  unites  men,  reason  is  social.  Hence  the 
Stoics  emphasized  the  social  nature  of  man  so  far  as  he 
is  rational.  We  were  made  for  cooperation,  but  by  our 
passions  we  are  divided  and  sundered  from  each  other. 
By  the  reason  we  are  united.  Hence  the  Stoics  lay  stress 
on  the  duty  of  man  to  fulfill  his  social  obligations.  The 
duty  of  man  is  to  live  according  to  the  real  nature  of 
things,  and,  in  so  far  as  men  do  this,  they  are  brothers. 
Earth  is  our  dear  fatherland,  and  we  men  are  all  brothers. 
The  world  is  our  home. 

Man  is  man,  not  because  of  his  language,  or  the  color 
of  his  hair,  or  skin,  or  by  any  other  physical  accident,  but 
solely  through  the  exercise  of  reason.  This  is  an  antici¬ 
pation  of  the  Christian  doctrine  of  the  universal  brother¬ 
hood  of  men.  By  virtue  of  this  notion  of  a  common,  ra¬ 
tional  nature  in  man,  the  Stoical  philosophy  became  the 
rational  basis  of  Roman  law.  When  Rome  passed  from 
being  a  city  state  to  the  form  of  an  empire,  the  practical 
Romans  were  confronted  with  the  problem  of  nationaliza¬ 
tion.  The  problem  of  the  Parthian,  Mede,  Greek,  Jew, 
Gaul,  Briton,  Teuton,  et  cetera,  pressed  for  solution.  All 
these  tribes  were  parts  of  the  Roman  government.  Now 
the  Stoical  philosophy  suggested  the  solution  in  that  it  had 
developed  the  idea  of  humanity  as  distinct  from  that  of 
Greek,  Jew,  et  cetera,  and  on  this  basis  Roman  Imperial 
law  was  constructed.  Man  as  man  was  seen  to  be  worthy 
of  rights.  It  was  on  this  Stoical  principle  that  Roman 
law  was  made  to  rest.  This  idea  of  free  personality  as 
the  subject  of  rights  and  duties  has  its  development  in 
Roman  Imperial  law,  resting  ultimately  upon  Stoical 


STOIC  PANTHEISM  149 

philosophy.  This  step  was  a  most  tremendous  one  for  the 
organization  of  civilization.4 

Stoicism  became  the  rallying  point  for  the  strongest 
spirits  of  the  Roman  Empire,  and  in  addition  to  its  appeal 
to  these  spirits,  it  had  a  very  widespread  influence.  Teach¬ 
ers  of  Stoicism  traveled  about  like  itinerant  preachers. 
They  were  both  the  teachers  and  preachers  of  morals. 
These  itinerant  teachers  were  domiciled  in  the  homes  of 
the  great.  It  was  the  work  of  such  as  these  that  really 
prepared  the  way  for  Christianity.  St.  Paul’s  sermon  on 
Mars  Hill  undoubtedly  refers  to  the  Stoical  hymn  to  Zeus, 
and  throughout  the  New  Testament  many  terms  and  ex¬ 
pressions  of  stoical  origin  are  used,  as,  for  example,  “in 
him  we  live  and  move  and  have  our  being.” 

Stoicism  has  deeply  influenced  many  modern  thinkers. 
Descartes  was  really  a  Stoic  in  his  ethical  attitude ;  so  were 
Spinoza,  Leibnitz,  and  others. 

Why  was  Stoicism  not  the  salt  which  was  to  save  Roman 
society?  Why  was  it  not  sufficient?  The  answer  is,  it 
was  too  cold  and  lofty  for  the  masses  of  men.  It  did  ap¬ 
peal  to  the  high-minded  man,  but  it  did  not  supply  any 
dynamic  that  could  lift  the  average  man  above  the  range 
of  his  senses.  It  did  not  generate  any  consuming  passion 
for  humanity.  The  Stoic  proclaimed  that  the  masses  were 
fools  and  only  the  few  were  wise.  Stoicism  thus,  wTith  all 
its  optimism  in  theory,  did  not  supply  a  strong  dynamic 
and  a  transfiguring  hope  as  the  days  of  the  Empire’s  fall 
drew  near. 

4  There  are  three  stages  in  the  development  of  the  Roman  con¬ 
ception  of  law,  which  meet  the  developing  needs  of  the  Roman  state : 
1,  the  law  of  the  city,  jus  civile,  founded  on  custom  and  having  to 
do  with  the  citizens  alone;  2,  the  laws  of  nations,  jus  gentium,  which 
applied  to  all  freemen;  and  3,  the  law  of  nature,  jus  naturale ,  which 
applied  to  all  human  beings. 


150 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


References 

Arnold,  Edward  Vernon,  Roman  Stoicism. 

*  Avey,  Albert  E.,  Readings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  IX. 

*  Bakewell,  Charles  M.,  Source  Book  in  Ancient  Philosophy, 

pp.  269-289,  317-339. 

Bevan,  E.,  Stoics  and  Sceptics. 

*  Epictetus,  Discourses,  translation  by  Long,  Higginson. 

Hicks,  R.  D.,  Stoic  and  Epicurean. 

*  Marcus  Aurelius,  Meditations,  translation  by  Long. 

Pater,  Walter  W.,  Marius  the  Epicurean. 

*  Rogers,  Arthur  Kenyon,  History  of  Philosophy,  pp.  137-159. 

*  Seneca,  On  Benefits. 

*  Stock,  St.  Geo.,  Stoicism. 

*  Thilly,  Frank,  History  of  Philosophy,  pp.  104-116. 

References  on  the  General  Spiritual  Development  in  the 

Gr^co-Roman  World 

*  Brett,  G.  S.,  The  Government  of  Man ,  Chapters  VI,  VII  and 

VIII. 

*  Cumont,  F.  V.  M.,  Oriental  Religions  in  Roman  Paganism. 
Dill,  Samuel,  Roman  Society  from  Nero  to  Marcus  Aurelius. 
Fowler,  W.  Warde,  The  Religious  Experience  of  the  Roman 

People,  Lectures  XVI  and  XVII. 

Mahaffy,  James  P.,  Greek  Life  and  Thought,  Greek  World 
Under  Roman  Sway. 

*  Marvin,  Walter  T.,  History  of  European  Philosophy,  pp. 

164-191. 

*  Murray,  Gilbert,  Four  Stages  of  Greek  Religion. 

Plutarch,  Morals. 

*  Thilly,  Frank,  History  of  Philosophy,  pp.  94-97. 


CHAPTER  X 


MYSTICISM - NEOPLATONISM 

I.  The  Meaning  of  Mysticism 

This  too  is  a  distinctive  type — it  is  a  new  type  of  re¬ 
ligions  philosophy.  Many  attempts  have  been  made  to  de¬ 
fine  mysticism.  As  I  understand  mysticism  it  is  a  doc¬ 
trine  which  holds  that  it  is  possible  for  the  human  soul 
to  have  direct  access  to  divinity.  Mysticism  rests  on  the 
assumption  of  the  possibility  of  a  direct  and  immediate 
communion  with  God,  without  the  intervention  of  any  in¬ 
termediate  agency.  It  is  the  sense  of  the  ‘  ‘  immediate  pres¬ 
ence”  of  the  Divine  to  the  soul  of  the  experient;  in  other 
words,  the  presence  of  a  Reality  whose  being  is  not  mediated 
by  either  sense  perception  or  rational  inference. 

Mystical  experiences  are  not  confined  to  what  are  ordi¬ 
narily  called  religious  states  of  mind.  In  the  broadest  sense 
of  the  term  “  mysticism,  ”  any  intuition  or  immediate  ap¬ 
prehension  of  a  being  that  exists  beyond  the  data  given  by 
the  senses,  may  be  regarded  as  a  mystical  experience. 
When  the  lover  claims  to  have  an  intuitive  sense  of  the 
soul  of  his  beloved;  when  the  mother  “feels”  the  soul  of 
her  child ;  when  the  nature  lover  feels,  in  any  aspect  of 
nature,  “a  presence  far  more  deeply  interfused”;  or  when, 
contemplating  nature  in  its  entirety,  he  has  a  ‘  ‘  cosmic  emo¬ 
tion”;  all  such  attitudes  are  forms  of  mysticism.  Nature 
mysticism  is  characteristic  of  the  poetical  and  prose  liter¬ 
ature  of  the  Romantic  movement  and  of  the  American 
transcendentalists  including  Walt  Whitman.  Any  sense  or 

feeling  of  the  presence  of  a  “  Beyond,  ”  of  a  Life  not  appre- 

151 


152 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


hended  through  the  senses,  nor  inferred  from  perceptions, 
is  a  form  of  mysticism.  And  there  is,  obviously,  a  close 
kinship  between  the  “feeling”  of  life  and  beauty  in  nature 
and  in  human  beings,  and  religious  mysticism.  Moreover, 
since  the  sense  of  beauty  is  closely  connected  with  sex  feel¬ 
ing,  it  is  not  strange  that  the  mystic’s  language  should  be 
deeply  tinged  with  erotic  symbolism.  Indeed,  Plato  has 
set  the  pattern  for  this  symbolism  in  the  Symposium. 

In  specifically  religious  mysticism  the  Beyond  may  be 
pictured  or  conceived  as  a  personal  being,  Jesus,  Buddha, 
or  God ;  or  as  an  impersonal  and  cosmic  life  or  spirit,  the 
World  Soul,  the  LTniversal  Spirit,  Brahman. 

There  are  degrees  of  mystical  experience.  We  can  dis¬ 
tinguish  the  milder  form  of  mysticism,  in  which  the  ex- 
perient  feels  at  times  an  ineffable  Presence  without  being 
rapt  out  of  himself  into  an  ecstatic  condition  of  mergence 
in  the  Presence,  from  the  extreme  form,  in  which  the  mystic 
is  snatched  away  from  all  sense  of  his  earthly  surroundings 
and  of  his  own  body,  and  may  even  lose  all  feeling  of  his 
own  distinctness  as  an  individual.  St.  Paul  had  such  ec¬ 
static  seizures.  (Cf.  II  Corinthians  XII;  Galatians  II,  2; 
Acts  XVI,  9;  XVIII,  9,  10;  XXII,  17-22;  et  cetera).  In¬ 
deed,  the  Pauline  doctrine  of  the  “witness  of  the  Spirit” 
and  the  indwelling  Christ,  as  well  as  the  entire  trend  of  the 
Johannine  writings,  is  mystical.  Other  greatly  influential, 
Christian  mystical  writings  wTere  those  of  St.  Augustine, 
John  Tauler,  the  Imitation  of  Christ ,  the  Theologica  Ger- 
manica;  and,  among  Protestants,  Bunyan’s  Pilgrim’s  Prog¬ 
ress  and  George  Fox’s  Journal. 

The  milder  form  of  mystical  experience  has  been  very 
widespread.  We  find  it  among  Christians  of  all  denomina¬ 
tions,  Hindus,  and  even  Mohammedans  and  Jews;  and  also 
among  many,  like  Shelley,  Walt  Whitman,  and  Dr.  Bucke, 
who  did  not  count  themselves  members  of  any  sect.  With 
some  it  has  been  chiefly  a  vague,  and  withal  delightful, 


MYSTICISM— NEOPLATONISM 


153 


emotional  exaltation,  with  a  slight  imaginal  and  conceptual 
content.  With  others  the  imagery  and  concepts  have  been 
well  defined,  and  it  has  seemed  to  them  a  cognitive  experi¬ 
ence  of  superlative  value.  The  character  of  the  experience 
depends,  of  course,  upon  the  mental  individuality  and  cul¬ 
tural  environment  of  the  mystic. 

The  ecstatic  raptures  and  visions  of  Christian  mystics, 
such  as  St.  Teresa,  St.  Bonaventura,  St.  John  of  the  Cross, 
Julian  of  Norwich,  St.  Catherine  of  Siena,  Meister  Eckhart, 
and  Madame  Guyon,  as  well  as  of  Plotinus,  the  greatest  of 
pagan  mystics,  are  more  concentrated,  intenser  and,  there¬ 
fore,  much  rarer  cases  of  the  same  phenomenon  that  occurs 
frequently  in  the  milder  forms  of  mysticism.  If  the  latter 
have  any  cognitive  value  superior  to  sense  perception  and 
rational  inference,  there  is  no  good  reason  for  disallowing 
the  claims  of  the  ecstasy  to  be  a  first  hand  illumination  of 
ultimate  reality.  The  difference  between  the  two  types  of 
cases  is  one  of  degree,  not  of  kind. 

The  mystic  way,  Mystic  a  Via ,  of  course  varies  with  the 
different  types  of  mysticism.  Quietistic  mysticism,  emo¬ 
tional  mysticism,  sensuous  mysticism,  et  cetera,  all  elabo¬ 
rate  various  technic  for  achieving  the  communion  with  the 
Godhead.  The  mystic  may  conceive  the  Godhead  theisti- 
cally  or  pantheistically ;  either  as  the  Supreme  Person  who 
is  vet  “closer  to  us  than  breathing  and  nearer  than  hands 
and  feet”;  or  as  the  superpersonal  all-inclusive  Divine 
Spirit  or  Over  Soul,  the  Over  Soul  who,  as  Self  of  and  in  all 
selves  and  things,  is  more  than  a  Self.  The  Christian 
mystics,  such  as  St.  Paul,  Origen,  St.  Bernard  of  Clair- 
vaux,  Thomas  Aquinas,  Bonaventura,  St.  Teresa,  St.  John 
of  the  Cross,  Boehme,  George  Fox,  Henry  Vaughan,  con¬ 
ceive  God  personalistically ;  the  modern  nature  mystics, 
such  as  Shelley,  Wordsworth,  Tennyson,  Novalis,  Emerson, 
and  Walt  Whitman,  are  pantheistic  in  tendency.  I  think 
that  the  drift  of  the  mystical  experience  is  always,  when 


154 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


it  is  reflected  upon,  towards  pantheism,  towards  the  mer¬ 
gence  of  the  individual  soul  and  all  else  in  the  all-includ¬ 
ing  One  or  Superpersonal  Unity.  In  its  ethical  implica¬ 
tions  mysticism  may  be  individualistic  or  social.  The 
notion  of  God  as  the  Sustaining  Spirit  of  the  perfect  society, 
or  ideal  community,  would  seem  to  afford  the  best  synthesis 
of  the  ethical  or  social  and  the  mystical  motives.  (See 
further,  Chapters  XXIV  and  XXXI,  4.) 

It  is  impossible  here,  by  reason  of  space  limitations,  to 
give  even  a  summary  account  of  the  rise  and  development 
in  the  ancient  and  medieval  Christian  world  of  the  prac¬ 
tice  of  the  mystical  life  and  the  formulation  of  mystical 
theology  or  philosophy.  It  must  suffice  to  say  that  mysticism 
played  a  great  role  in  the  cultivation,  both  within  and  with¬ 
out  the  limits  of  Church  dogma  and  discipline,  of  personal 
and  experiential  religion,  and  of  philosophical  speculation. 
And,  at  the  beginning  of  the  modern  age,  the  reformers  of 
institutional  religion,  from  Luther  to  Loyola,  were  nurtured 
on  mysticism.  The  mystical  theology  of  Dionysius  the 
Areopagite,  John  the  Scot,  St.  Anselm,  Meister  Eckhart, 
Bonaventura,  and  Nicholas  of  Cusa,  were  the  forerunners 
of  the  great  idealistic  systems  of  Schelling  and  Hegel,  as 
well  as  of  the  earlier  modern  pantheisms  of  Bruno,  Boehme, 
and  Spinoza. 

The  first  and  still,  perhaps,  the  greatest  philosophy  of 
mystical  experience  (with  the  possible  exception  of  Hegel 
and  F.  H.  Bradley)  is  that  of  Plotinus,  a  pagan  Greek. 
He  is  the  true  father  of  philosophical  mysticism  in  the 
West;  and  his  system  the  fountainhead  of  speculative 
mysticism.  Therefore  his  system  is  worthy  of  extended 
consideration,  even  in  so  brief  an  outline  as  the  present 
one.1 

i  The  one  adequate  work  on  Plotinus  in  English  is  The  Philosophy 
of  Plotinus  by  Dean  W.  It.  Inge,  who  is,  so  far  as  I  know,  the  great¬ 
est  living  exponent  of  mysticism,  with  the  possible  exception  of 
Baron  F.  von  Hiigel. 


MYSTICISM— NEOPLATONISM 


155 


It  is  possible  to  trace  down  to  the  present  the  various 
lines  of  influence  which  he  initiated.  St.  Augustine,  John 
the  Scot,  Thomas  Aquinas,  Bruno,  Boehme,  Spinoza,  The 
Cambridge  Platonists  (Whichcote,  Smith,  Culverwell,  Cud- 
worth,  and  More),  Fichte,  Schelling,  Hegel,  the  German 
Romantic  School,  Berkeley,  the  English  poets — Wordsworth 
and  Shelley — Bradley,  Royce,  Emerson,  Bergson,  and 
many  more  reveal  this  mystical  motive.2 

Mysticism  as  a  movement  in  Greek  thought  goes  back 
to  both  the  Orphic  Mysteries  and  the  Pythagorean  brother¬ 
hood.  The  Pythagorean  brotherhood  was  a  society  which 
had  politicial,  as  well  as  ethical  and  religious,  tendencies. 
For  us  their  chief  interest  is  in  their  ethical  tendencies.  The 
reputed  founder  of  this  school  is  said  to  have  taught  at 

Crotona  and  to  have  died  about  500  B.  C.  His  life  is 

veiled  in  legend.  Plato  is  said  to  have  visited  this  brother¬ 
hood,  and  was  much  influenced  by  it.  For  Pythagorean- 
ism,  reality  consists  of  numbers.  Numbers  are  the  ungen¬ 
erated  principles  of  things.  They  seemed  to  find  in  the 
properties  of  numbers  analogies  to  the  facts  of  experience. 
They  investigated  the  mathematical  basis  of  music,  and 
were  greatly  influenced  by  the  results  of  their  researches 

in  this  field.  These  numbers  are  akin  to  the  ideas  of 

Platonism.  The  Pythagorean  brotherhood,  by  dietetics  and 
purgation,  and  by  speculation,  aimed  to  develop  the  soul 
to  where  it  could  have  the  mystical  union  with  the  divine. 
Such,  too,  was  the  motive  of  the  Orphic  Mysteries.  Pytha¬ 
gorean  writings  had  increased  influence  in  the  last  century 
B.  C.  and  in  the  first  centuries  A.  D. 

The  failure  of  the  rationally  grounded  ethics  of  Sto- 

2  Of  late  years  there  has  been  a  pronounced  revival  of  mysticism, 
and  many  books  on  the  subject  have  appeared.  Studies  in  Mystical 
Religion  by  It.  M.  Jones,  The  Mystic  Way  and  other  books  by  Miss 
Underhill,  Christian  Mysticism  by  W.  It.  Inge,  and  The  Mystical 
Element  in  Religion  by  Friedrich  von  Hiigel,  are  some  of  the  prin¬ 
cipal  works  on  this  revival. 


156 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


icism  to  satisfy  the  longing  of  the  time,  as  shown  by  the 
violent  reaction  against  sensualism  and  the  protest  against 
the  social  corruptions  of  the  time,  brought  about  an  in¬ 
tense  feeling  of  the  opposition  between  the  soul  and  the 
world,  and  between  the  spirit  and  the  flesh.  The  developing 
influence  of  Pythagoreanism,  and  of  oriental  cults  brought 
to  Rome,  all  point  in  the  direction  of  the  increasing  craving 
of  the  best  spirits  of  the  time  for  direct  union  of  the  soul 
with  the  Divine.  There  is  an  insatiable  craving  for  an  im¬ 
mediate  experience  of  the  Godhead.  In  Platonism  there 
was  much  to  fall  in  with  this  tendency,  and  so  the  influence 
of  Platonism  increased,  and  it  was  this  movement  which 
was  carried  on  to  its  completion  in  ancient  times  by  Neo¬ 
platonism. 

Neoplatonism  was  thus  prepared  for  by  Pythagoreanism. 
The  Neopythagoreans  and  Neoplatonists  were  eclectics  who 
tried  to  fit  together  into  a  harmonious  whole  the  funda¬ 
mental  elements  of  the  preceding  theories.  This  was  the 
form  of  speculative  mysticism  that  was  prevalent  in  the 
time  of  Plotinus.  In  various  quarters  we  find  that  the 
mystical  and  religious  side  of  Plato  is  eagerly  taken  up 
even  long  before  the  time  of  Plotinus.  The  estimable  Plu¬ 
tarch  uses  Platonic  philosophy  to  interpret  religious  differ¬ 
ences.  Philo  Judaeus  is  also  seen  interpreting  Jewish  re¬ 
ligion  in  terms  of  Platonic  philosophy.  In  doing  this  Philo 
posits  the  Logos  as  the  creative  principle  of  the  world.  The 
Logos  is  the  unity  from  which  come  all  ideas  or  logoi.  It 
is  the  divine,  creative  word,  by  which  the  world  was  fash¬ 
ioned.  This  creative  word,  the  immanent,  dynamic  reason 
of  God,  operates  in  the  world,  and  it  alone  stands  between 
God  and  the  world. 

For  mysticism  the  goal  of  life  is  the  vision  of  God — it 
is  deliverance  from  the  world  of  sense — it  is  ecstatic  union 
with  God.  This  type  of  thinking  was  given  its  classic 
formulation  at  Alexandria,  the  city  which  was  the  next 


MYSTICISM— NEOPLATONISM 


157 


greatest  center  of  philosophical  activity  after  Athens.  In 
this  great,  populous,  rich,  manufacturing  city,  all  the 
streams  of  higher  thought  met,  and  here  the  foundation 
was  laid  for  Christian  philosophy  by  Origen. 

II.  The  System  of  Plotinus 

Plotinus,  204-269,  was  a  native  of  Egypt,  and  a  pupil 
of  Ammonius  Saccas.  In  the  year  244  A.  D.,  he  estab¬ 
lished  a  school  at  Rome,  and  after  a  period  of  ten  years 
his  famous  school  had  the  Emperor  Gallienus  and  the 
empress  aligned  with  it.  Plotinus  himself  was  a  man  of 
strong  personality  attested  to  by  the  fact  that  many  noble 
Romans  made  him  the  guardian  of  their  children.  Hav¬ 
ing  weak  eyes,  he  did  not  like  to  write.  It  is  for  this 
reason  that  his  works  have  not  the  clearness  and  the 
well-rounded  symmetry  which  is  characteristic  of  many 
other  philosophies.  His  fundamental  thought  is  that  real¬ 
ity  is  through  and  through  spiritual,  and  that  it  is  One. 
The  One  or  Monad  is  God,  the  Absolute.  Below  the  One 
or  the  absolute  Spirit  is  the  “nous, ”  and  below  “nous” 
is  “psyche.”  Lowest  of  all,  in  the  scale  of  being,  is 
Matter — the  formless  or  indefinite,  the  principle  of  plur¬ 
ality,  ugliness  and  evil.  Plotinus,  like  Plato  and  Aris¬ 
totle,  does  not  regard  matter  as  nonexistent  but  as  the 
source  of  change  and  manyness  and  imperfection ;  in  short, 
as  the  indefinite  potentiality  of  all  things  finite,  imperfect, 
and  changing.  Matter  exists  in  many  forms  as  bodies.  The 
Idea  or  Notion  of  matter  exists  in  the  mind.  But  matter, 
as  the  metaphysical  principle  of  plurality,  without  which 
the  realm  of  individual  souls  and  the  world  of  the  senses 
would  not  exist,  is  simply  the  lowest  stage  in  the  necessary 
emanation  of  the  world  from  God.  Without  matter,  al¬ 
though  the  latter  by  itself  is  darkness,  impotence,  nothing¬ 
ness,  there  would  be  no  distinction  between  human  souls 


158 


rHE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


and  the  world  soul.  The  One,  or  God,  is  above  definition 
or  conception.  He  is  the  source  from  which  irradiate  or 
emanate,  first ,  Thought  or  Nous  (which  is  the  unity  of  the 
Ideas,  in  the  Platonic  sense,  and  which,  hence,  is  the  in¬ 
telligible  pattern  of  the  world  of  phenomena)  ;  second, 
Super  sensuous  Soul  or  Psyche,  which,  as  thinking  the 
Ideas,  is  World  Soul,  and,  as  seeking  to  express  itself  in 
matter,  is  Nature  or  the  world  of  space  and  time ;  third, 
Matter  or  Hyle,  on  which  individual  souls,  themselves  parts 
of  the  world  soul,  act,  fashioning  it  into  bodies  in  the  like¬ 
ness  of  the  ideas.  The  whole  process  of  emanation  is  an 
eternal  and  inevitable  descent  from  Unity,  through  Duality, 
to  Plurality.  The  existence  of  a  world  of  incarnate  souls 
is  the  necessary  result  of  a  fall  from  the  supra-intelligible 
One.  Thus,  the  Incarnation  is  the  fall  of  God  himself 
into  material  forms,  although  Plotinus  holds  that  God  does 
not  lose  anything  of  himself  in  this  process  of  world  forma¬ 
tion.  Salvation,  or  redemption,  as  we  shall  see,  is  the 
reverse  movement  of  Discar  nation,  or  release  from  fleshy 
matter  and  plurality  into  heavenly  or  spiritual  body  and 
unity. 

In  man  are  “nous”  (Spirit),  “psj^che”  (soul),  and 
“sarx”  (flesh  or  body).  Thus  there  is  a  trinity  in  man, 
which  epitomizes  the  trinity  of  Thought  or  Spirit,  Soul, 
and  Body,  in  the  world  at  large.  Man  is  the  microcosmic 
reproduction  of  the  macrocosm.  Objectively,  body  is  the 
world  as  it  is  perceived  through  the  senses ;  the  soul  is  the 
world  interpreted  as  a  spatial  and  temporal  order  by  the 
discursive  reason,  while  spirit  is  the  world  as  apprehended 
by  direct  intuition.  Reality  is  really  a  trinity  in  unity.  It 
is  the  intuiting  “nous, ”  the  objects  apprehended,  and  the 
act  of  intuition.  The  summit  of  knowledge  is  the  attain¬ 
ment  of  a  divine  insight,  in  which  spirit  is  at  one  with  the 
object.  This  fruition  is  the  vision  of  God;  it  is  the  con¬ 
templation  of  God  that  is  the  ultimate  goal  of  knowledge. 


MYSTICISM— NEOPLATONISM 


159 


The  world  of  appearance  is  of  scattered,  disconnected, 
diverse,  data.  It  is  what  William  James  called  a  big,  bloom¬ 
ing,  buzzing  confusion.  But,  as  this  world  is  illuminated 
by  mind,  it  is  seen  to  manifest  a  unity.  In  the  theory  of 
Plotinus,  there  are  two  aspects  which  in  a  rough  way 
correspond  to  the  two  phases  of  scientific  analysis,  that  is, 
to  the  inductive  process  of  discovering  the  universal,  and 
to  the  deductive  process  of  applying  the  same.  The  first 
of  these  aspects  in  Plotinus  is  that  which  tells  of  the  descent 
of  existence  from  the  Absolute.  By  the  second  aspect, 
Plotinus  shows  the  mode  of  ascent  of  the  soul  to  the  Abso¬ 
lute.  The  Absolute,  the  One,  is  above  existence,  it  is  with¬ 
out  form,  it  is  before  motion  and  rest ;  and  to  reach  the 
Absolute  one  must  pass  beyond  knowledge.  One  must  pass 
to  the  unity  which  is  implied  in  duality.  The  Absolute  is 
also  the  one  universal  good,  which  is  above  all  things  and 
the  cause  of  all  things.  It  cannot  be  named.  It  is  above 
thinking.  It  is  the  first  principle  of  thinking :  it  is  the 
root  of  the  soul.  In  brief,  it  is  the  absolute  unity  of  truth, 
beauty,  and  goodness.  In  this  way  the  highest  form  of 
reality  is  seen  to  consist  of  these  ideas  as  a  unity.  This 
unity,  this  oneness  of  all  things,  is  the  indivisible  root  of 
subjectivity  and  objectivity,  of  thought  and  things.  We 
thus  see  that  this  doctrine  is  a  metaphysics  of  moral, 
aesthetic,  and  intellectual  values. 

How  do  the  many  arise  from  the  One  ?  This  is  the  most 
difficult  question  in  all  philosophy.  This  is  the  question 
as  to  how  we  are  to  conceive  of  the  embodiment  of  uni- 
versals  in  particular  existences.  To  this  question  Plotinus 
replies :  The  many  arise  by  effulgence,  by  irradiation 
from  the  One.  As  light  radiates  from  the  sun,  so  by  reason 
of  his  very  fulness  of  being,  individual  objects  emanate 
from  the  One.  The  One  first  expresses  himself  in  “nous.” 
This  is  the  first  step  down  from  the  Absolute  to  the  many. 
“Nous,”  in  turn,  expresses  itself  by  an  outflow  or  a  shining 


160 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


forth  in  the  cosmic  world.  The  world  comes  from  the  divine 
spirit  or  “nous.”  The  soul  of  the  world  is  the  cause  of  all 
things.  This  world  soul  is  unmoved  and  eternal.  The  One 
in  thus  manifesting  itself  remains  undiminished. 

In  brief,  then,  the  system  of  Plotinus  is  one  of  dynamic 
outflow  from,  and  reunion  with,  the  One.  God,  the  One  Exhaust¬ 
less  Source  of  all  being,  is  above  all  definition.  He  cannot  even 
properly  be  named  One  (monas) ;  this  term  is  the  best  symbol 
for  him.  He  is  the  source  of  all  forms,  but  without  form;  the 
source  of  all  good,  but  above  the  good ;  the  fountain  of  all  beauty, 
but  above  all  finite  forms  of  beauty;  the  ground  of  all  ideas  and 
knowledge,  but  above  all  ideas  and  knowledge.  He  is  the  inex¬ 
haustible  spring  of  life  and  mind,  the  principle  of  being,  the  cause 
of  the  good,  the  root  of  the  soul.  All  these  flow  forth  from  him 
but  he  remains  undiminished.  He  is  above  Thought  or  Mind 
(Nous),  since  the  latter  involves  the  duality  of  Knowing  and  the 
Object  Known  (of  Nous  and  Noeton).  Nous  is  his  first  Image, 
since  Nous  is,  in  itself,  undivided  and  the  ground  of  the  Ideas  or 
forms,  and  is  the  unity-in-duality  of  Thought  and  the  Objects 
thought.  As  being  the  Universal  Mind  or  Spirit,  Nous  is  the 
Logos,  the  unitary  ground  of  the  Ideas,  which  fills  the  soul  of 
the  world  with  itself.  The  world  soul  is  the  Image  of  the  Nous. 
( Cf .  Plato,  Timceus,  from  which  this  doctrine  is  derived.)  The 
world  soul  is  the  cause  of  the  existence  of  the  plurality  of  things, 
and  of  all  their  life  and  movement.  It  is  the  cosmical  principle 
of  life.  From  it  come  all  souls.  The  human  soul  is  a  fragment  of 
the  world  soul.  From  the  desire  of  the  finite  soul  to  live  the  life 
of  sense,  together  with  the  desire  of  the  world  soul  10  fashion 
matter,  arise  bodies.  The  soul  is  the  principle  of  life  and  move¬ 
ment  in  the  body.  Thus  the  individual  soul  is  the  meeting-place 
of  mind  or  spirit  and  body.  The  soul  is  free,  either  to  choose  to 
abide  in  the  sense  life  or  to  retrace  its  way  back  to  God.  As  to 
matter  Plotinus  makes  a  distinction  between  the  particular  sen¬ 
suous  matter,  which  forms  the  body  for  the  individual  soul,  and 
the  ethereal  matter  which  is  the  product  of  the  Cosmical  Mind 
or  Spirit.  Celestial  souls,  free  from  the  thraldom  of  sense, 
have  ethereal  bodies  of  light  (cf.  St.  Paul,  I  Corinthians,  Ch.  XV, 
on  bodies  celestial  and  bodies  terrestrial).  Thus  it  is  erroneous 
to  say  that  Plotinus  was  a  dualist  for  whom  all  matter  or  body 
is  evil.  Evil  for  him  consists  in  the  isolation  of  the  individual 


MYSTICISM— NEOPLATONISM 


161 


from  his  fellows  and  from  God,  which  is  a  consequence  of  the 
pursuit,  by  the  soul,  of  the  life  of  the  senses.  Evil  is  separation, 
egoism,  or  selfishness. 

It  is  interesting  to  ask,  what  does  Plotinus  mean  by 
the  distinction  of  spirit  and  soul?  The  cosmic  soul  is  a 
vaguer  principle  than  the  cosmic  spirit  or  nous  ;  in  some 
respects  it  seems  to  be  less  self-conscious  than  spirit. 
From  the  cosmic  soul  come  all  individual  souls.  All  souls 
are  derived  from  the  universal  soul.  Plotinus  conceives 
of  the  soul  as  the  meeting  place  of  intelligence  and  body, 
and  he  holds  that  there  are  three  orders  of  souls,  namely: 

1.  Heavenly  souls 

2.  Souls  enmeshed  in  matter 

3.  Souls  that  waver  between  these  two 

Our  souls  have  preexisted  in  the  celestial  world ;  they  have 
fallen.  Why  did  they  fall?  At  this  point  Plotinus  is  not 
unambiguous.  In  some  parts  of  his  works,  the  view  taken 
is  the  same  as  that  in  certain  of  the  Platonic  dialogues, 
namely,  that  the  fall  is  a  part  of  the  divine  purpose,  while 
in  other  parts  he  holds  that  the  fall  is  due  to  acts  com¬ 
mitted  by  the  soul.  The  lowest  step  of  existence  is  ensouled 
flesh.  In  this  way  we  see  the  descent  from  the  One  to  the 
many. 

The  prime  interest  of  ethics  and  religion  is  to  point  out 
how  the  soul  may  ascend  to  God.  In  giving  his  interpre¬ 
tation,  Plotinus  rests  continuously  on  the  validity  of  his 
assumption  that  nature  is  the  expression  of  the  cosmical 
soul.  And  when  the  human  mind  begins  to  get  its  ori¬ 
entation  in  experience  by  ordering  things  in  space  and 
time,  it  begins  to  make  its  way  back  toward  the  Absolute. 
Space  and  time  are  both  modes  of  discovering  the  One  in 
the  man}-.  Now  the  universal  soul  is  not  in  the  world,  but 
the  world  is  in  it.  The  world  is  in  the  universal  soul; 
the  universal  soul  depends  upon  the  universal  spirit ;  the 
universal  spirit,  in  turn,  depends  upon  the  One.  Only 


162 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


by  contemplating  the  One  is  it  possible  for  the  individual 
to  realize  his  true  destiny.  Man  has  in  him  a  fragment 
of  the  Absolute,  and,  through  insight  and  spiritual  con¬ 
tact,  he  becomes  one  with  the  Absolute.  The  individual 
passes  through  several  stages.  The  first  step  in  this  ascent 
is  the  practice  of  social  virtues  such  as  wisdom,  courage, 
justice,  and  self-control.  The  second  step  is  the  practice 
of  purification  (katharsis).  At  this  stage  there  is  effected 
a  complete  subjection  of  the  flesh — a  freedom  from  all 
thraldom  to  passion  is  attained.3  At  this  point  Plotinus 
uses  the  Platonic  idea  of  philosophical  love.  Every  soul 
by  nature  loves  and  desires  oneness  with  another.  But 
there  are  stages  of  this  form  of  love.  True  love,  as  op¬ 
posed  to  earthly  love,  is  kindled  by  the  vision  of  all  things 
in  one.  The  living  soul  through  this  love  is  transformed 
and  embraced  in  the  unity  of  the  whole.  The  final  step, 
and  this  is  one  which  requires  intense  concentration,  is 
the  direct  union  with  the  One.  This  stage  Plotinus  calls 
“ekstasis.”  It  is  an  absolute  self -surrender,  “epidosis.” 
The  experience  is  that  to  which  we  referred  above  as  being 
higher  than  knowledge.  It  is  beyond  knowledge ;  it  is  one¬ 
ness  with  the  One.  This  union  with  God  is  attainable 
through  concentration  and  self -surrender.  It  is  a  spiritual 
contact  in  which  we  reach  the  fountain  of  being,  and  in 
this  experience  the  soul  is  alone  with  the  Alone.  Through 
these  three  types  of  experience,  the  individual  is  led  to 
God;  and  in  this  beatific  experience,  the  emotional  aspect 
of  which  is  characterized  by  Spinoza  as  “intellectual  love 
of  God,”  there  is  a  contemplation  of  beauty,  truth,  and 
love.  In  this  experience  all  separate  existences  have  van- 

3  Compare  the  Four  Noble  Truths  of  Buddha:  1,  suffering  is  the 
accompaniment  of  change;  2,  desire  is  the  cause  of  suffering;  3,  the 
suppression  of  desire  is  the  only  means  of  escaping  suffering;  4,  the 
three  stages  in  the  achievement  of  this  suppression  are  uprightness, 
meditation  and  wisdom. 


MYSTICISM— NEOPLATONISM 


163 


ished  as  being  illusory,  and  all  individual  souls  have 
merged  into  oneness  with  the  Godhead. 

Thus,  for  Plotinus,  the  Highest  Good  is  progressively  at¬ 
tained  in  so  far  as  man  achieves,  step  by  step,  first,  through 
the  practice  of  the  ordinary  and  civic  virtues,  control  of  his 
body  and  harmony  with  his  fellows,  then  speculative  or  con¬ 
templative  union  with  the  cosmical  mind  or  spirit,  and,  finally, 
ecstatic  union  with  the  Godhead.  Thoroughly  Platonic  is  his 
doctrine  of  the  ascent  of  Love  from  the  vulgar  and  fleshly  love 
to  the  love  whose  consummation  is  contemplative  union  with 
the  universe  and  with  God.  Love,  he  says,  is  union  of  souls.  But 
earthly  love,  in  which  this  union  is  accomplished  through  bodily 
union,  is  mortal  and  easily  passes  into  its  opposite.  The  true 
love,  the  love  of  God,  is  a  spiritual  embrace,  by  which  the  mortal 
soul  is  wholly  transformed,  through  being  wholly  laid  hold  upon 
by  the  Divine.  This  is  the  true  being,  the  pure  and  unmixed 
actuality,  of  the  soul,  the  union  with  God  who  is  the  beginning 
and  the  end.  This  experience  is  not  a  spectacle,  but  an  ecstasy 
and  a  self-surrender,  above  beauty  and  above  virtue.  In  it  we 
reach  the  invisible  sanctuary  and  fountain  and  principle  of  all, 
and  attain  a  life,  passionless,  blessed,  and  divine.  No  finer  at¬ 
tempt  to  satisfy  man’s  spiritual  needs,  by  a  fusion  of  speculative 
and  ethical  motives,  since  Plato,  can  be  found  than  the  system 
of  Plotinus.  He  uses  the  basic  doctrines  of  Plato  and  Aristotle, 
but  his  system  is  not  a  mere  patchwork.  It  is  an  original  and 
well-knit  synthesis.  There  is  not  space  here  to  consider  the  suc¬ 
cessors  of  Plotinus  in  the  school.  It  declined  before  the  increasing 
influence  of  the  Christian  system.  But  Neoplatonism  has  had 
an  immense,  and  still  continuing,  influence,  both  on  Christian 
theology  and  independent  philosophy. 

This  Neoplatonic  view  is  the  last  speculative  and  re¬ 
ligious  effort  of  Greek  genius.  It  is  a  universal  philoso¬ 
phy,  having  incorporated  into  itself  elements  from  all 
preceding  philosophies  save  Epicureanism.  It  has  al¬ 
ready  been  stated  that  the  growing  demand  of  the  social 
tissue  was  for  union  with  the  Godhead.  The  way  to  this 
union  is  here  charted.  This  system  also  represents  the 
consummation  of  Greek  thought.  Many  modern  systems 


164 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


of  philosophy  are  at  heart  the  same  as  Neoplatonism.  This 
is  preeminently  true  of  the  systems  of  Spinoza,  Fichte, 
Schelling,  Hegel,  F.  H.  Bradley. 

Neoplatonism  failed.  Christianity  conquered.  Why? 
Neoplatonism  was  unable  to  tell  men  how  to  make  the  state 
of  peace  endure.  It  was  unable  to  make  its  philosophy 
take  hold  of  the  masses.  Its  method  or  way  of  ecstatic 
union  with  the  Godhead  was  too  hard  for  the  ordinary 
man.  It  did  not,  and  indeed  by  the  nature  of  the  case, 
it  could  not,  present  its  way  of  life  and  salvation  incar¬ 
nated  in  a  historic  personality  able  to  stir  men’s  affection 
and  command  their  loyalty.  But  this  is  precisely  what 
Christianity  did.  The  story  is  told  of  a  certain  propa¬ 
gandist  of  a  new  rose-water  religion  of  universal  philan¬ 
thropy  in  the  days  following  the  French  Revolution  who, 
disappointed  at  the  failure  of  his  religion  to  make  head¬ 
way,  asked  advice  of  that  old  cynic  Talleyrand.  The  latter 
replied,  “I  recommend  that  one  of  you  be  crucified  and 
rise  again  the  third  day.  ’  ’ 

References 

*  Avey,  Albert  E.,  Readings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  X. 

*  Bakewell,  Source  Book  in  Ancient  Philosophy,  pp.  340-393. 
Bigg,  Charles,  Neoplatonism,  and  Christian  Platonists  of  Alex¬ 
andria. 

*  Dill,  Samuel,  Roman  Society  in  the  Last  Century  of  the 

Western  Empire. 

*  Encyclopedia  Britannica,  11th  ed.,  Article  “Neoplatonism.” 
Fuller,  B.  A.  G.,  The  Problem  of  Evil  in  Plotinus. 

Guthrie,  Kenneth  S.,  The  Complete  Works  of  Plotinus 
(Translation,  to  be  used  with  caution). 

*  Hastings,  James,  Encyclopedia  of  Religion  and  Ethics,  article, 

“Neoplatonism.” 

Inge,  W.  R.,  Christian  Mysticism,  and  The  Philosophy  of  Plo¬ 
tinus. 

MacKenna,  Stephen,  Translation  of  the  Ethical  Writings  of 
Plotinus. 


MYSTICISM— NEOPLATONISM 


165 


Taylor,  Thos.,  Selections  from  Plotinus  (translation). 

*  Weber,  Alfred,  History  of  Philosophy,  pp.  167-184. 
Whittaker,  T.,  The  Neoplatonists. 

On-  the  General  Psychology  of  Mysticism 

*  Boutroux,  E.,  “The  Psychology  of  Mysticism”  in  International 

Journal  of  Ethics,  Yol.  XVIII. 

*  Coe,  George  A.,  Psychology  of  Religion,  Chapter  XVI. 

*  Cutten,  George  Barton,  Psychological  Phenomena  of  Chris¬ 

tianity,  Chapters  III-XT;  XXIV. 

DelaCroix,  H.,  Etudes  d’histoire  et  de  psychologie  du  mysticisme. 
HiiGEL,  von,  F.,  The  Mystical  Element  in  Religion. 

*  James,  William,  The  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,  Lec¬ 

tures  XI-XVII. 

*  Pratt,  James  Bissett,  The  Religious  Consciousness,  Chapters 

XVI-XX. 


Classics  of  Christian  Mysticism 

Boehme,  Jacob,  The  Signature  of  All  Things  (in  Everyman’s 
Library). 

Bunyan,  John,  Pilgrim’s  Progress. 

Fox,  George,  Journal. 

St.  Augustine  of  Hippo,  Confessions,  City  of  God. 

St.  Ignatius  Loyola,  Spiritual  Exercises. 

St.  John  of  the  Cross,  Ascent  of  Mount  Carmel. 

St.  Teresa  of  Jesus,  Life,  Way  of  Perfection. 

Tauler,  John,  Life,  Sermons. 

Theologica  Germanica  (translation  by  Susanna  Winkworth). 
Thomas  a  Kempis,  The  Imitation  of  Christ. 

A  very  interesting  work  by  a  forgotten  English  Mystic,  Thomas 
Traherne,  Centuries  of  Meditation,  was  discovered  and  published 
a  few  years  ago.  The  poems  and  books  of  visions  of  William 
Blake  belong  in  the  category  of  mystical  writings. 


CHAPTER  XI 


EARLY  CHRISTIAN  PHILOSOPHY 

The  original  Christian  Gospel  was  not  a  system  of 
philosophy.  It  was  a  religion  claiming  the  definite  author¬ 
ity  of  a  revelation  from  God,  and  it  appealed  primarily 
to  the  emotions  and  consciences  of  men.  It  enjoined  cer¬ 
tain  principles  of  conduct.  The  motives  to  enable  men 
to  obey  these  principles  were  offered  in  the  feelings  of 
gratitude  and  love  for  the  Savior  who  died  for  them  and 
arose  again,  in  the  promise  made  of  an  immortal  and 
blessed  life  for  the  faithful,  and  in  the  fear  of  divine  judg¬ 
ment  upon  the  disobedient. 

So  long  as  primitive  Christianity  was  a  religion  of  the 
lowly  and  made  popular  appeal  on  these  grounds,  and 
while  it  continued,  as  in  its  origin  it  was,  a  movement 
within  the  Jewish  Church,  it  did  not  make  much  use  of 
philosophy.  As  soon,  however,  as  it  began  to  spread  in 
the  Roman  world  and  came  into  contact  with  the  civiliza¬ 
tion  of  the  day,  and  indeed,  even  before  it  thus  began  to 
spread,  it  came  into  contact  with  the  all-pervading  Greek 
philosophy.  The  highest  culture  of  the  Empire  was  Greek 
in  character,  and  in  Alexandria  the  Jewish  theologian, 
Philo,  30  B.  C. — 50  A.  D.,  had  already  been  deeply  influ¬ 
enced  by  Greek  culture.  The  Logos  was  conceived  by  him 
as  the  creative  and  revelatory  Word  of  God,  the  immanent 
Divine  Reason,  operative  in  the  world,  and  the  unitary 
principle  of  the  world  of  Ideas,  Universal  Types  or  Pat¬ 
terns,  according  to  which  all  things  were  made.  The  early 
Christian  philosophy  is  a  synthesis  of  the  Christian  re¬ 
ligion  and  Greek  philosophy,  for  which  the  Jewish-Greek 

166 


EARLY  CHRISTIAN  PHILOSOPHY 


167 


philosophy  of  Philo  paved  the  way.  It  was  an  attempt  to 
state  the  fundamental  principles  of  Christianity  in  terms 
of  Greek  philosophy.  Just  so  in  every  age,  religion  must 
either  remain  dumb  or  speak  in  terms  of  that  age’s  con¬ 
cepts,  if  it  is  to  speak  to  the  cultured. 

The  ethical  content  of  Christianity  is,  in  some  impor¬ 
tant  respects,  closely  akin  to  the  ethical  teachings  of  Plato 
and  the  Stoics.  The  Hebrew  and  the  Christian  conception 
of  God  as  the  Supreme  Good  is  thoroughly  Platonic,  while 
the  conception  of  God  as  overruling  Providence  is  Stoic. 
It  was  because  of  the  incorporation  of  these  basic  prin¬ 
ciples  in  the  more  spiritual  forms  of  late  Greek  philosophy, 
that  Philo  and  others  recognized  an  identity  of  Doctrine 
in  Plato,  Moses,  and  the  prophets.  The  Apologists  of 
Christianity  went  further  than  this  and  held  that  the 
Logos  was  manifested  in  Socrates  and  Plato.  Justin  Mar¬ 
tyr,  who  flourished  about  140,  the  first  one  of  these  Apolo¬ 
gists,  was  a  philosopher  dissatisfied  with  the  results  of 
Greek  philosophy,  and  he  turned  to  Christianity  because 
of  its  practical  fruits.  He  did  not,  however,  give  up  Greek 
philosophy.  He  showed  the  harmony  of  Greek  philosophy 
and  Christianity.  He  regards  Greek  philosophy  as  being 
a  preparation  for  Christianity. 

I.  Ethical  Content  of  Christianity 

The  ethical  content  of  Christianity  may  be  subsumed 
under  the  following  eight  heads : 

1.  God  is  the  spiritual  Father  of  men. 

2.  Human  souls  are  of  supreme  value  in  the  eyes  of  God, 
because  men  have  within  them  by  birth  the  capacity  for 
realizing  divine  sonship. 

3.  Men  should  treat  one  another  as  brothers. 

4.  Divine  sonship  implies  the  practice  of  sympathy,  serv¬ 
ice,  cooperation,  forbearance,  and  forgiveness. 


168 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


5.  The  quality  of  man’s  character  for  good  or  ill  and 
the  judgment  passed  upon  him  by  God  depend  upon  motive 
and  intent,  and  not  upon  external  acts. 

6.  Nothing  in  the  world  has  any  value  as  against  the 
right  life  of  the  soul. 

7.  The  Christian  ideal  of  life  is  to  be  realized  in  a  new 
social  order,  The  Kingdom  of  God,  in  which  we  shall  treat 
all  men  as  brothers  in  God. 

8.  This  kingdom  is  to  be  ruled,  not  by  force  or  external 
authority,  but  by  motives  of  good  will  and  love. 

Christianity  takes  its  origin  from  the  life  of  an  historic 
person  who  was  believed  to  have  sacrificed  his  life  for  men 
and  to  have  arisen  from  the  dead.  His  resurrection  was 
taken  to  be  the  final  authentic  seal  of  the  divine  character 
of  his  mission.  Jesus  was  held  by  his  followers  to  have 
been,  in  a  unique  sense,  the  Son  of  God.  The  promise 
which  he  made  to  send  to  his  disciples,  after  his  departure, 
the  Holy  Spirit  to  guide  and  inspire  them,  was  believed  to 
have  been  fulfilled.  Thus  the  Christians  believed  in  a 
triune  God — Father,  Son,  and  Holy  Spirit.  It  is  this  con¬ 
nection  of  Christianity  with  an  historic  person  that  funda¬ 
mentally  distinguishes  the  Christian  religion  from  Greek 
philosophy.  As  against  this  association  with  an  historic 
factor,  Greek  philosophy  dealt  with  eternal  truths  which 
have  nothing  to  do  with  time  and  place.  As  time  goes  on 
in  the  last  centuries  B.  C.,  there  becomes  manifest  in  the 
Graeco-Roman  world  an  increasing  hunger  for  an  author¬ 
itative  revelation  and  way  of  redemption.  Indeed,  it  was 
taught  later  that  both  Socrates  and  Plato  were  divine 
revealers.  It  was  because  of  this  general  demand  for  the 
revelation  of  a  divinely  authenticated  method  of  redemp¬ 
tion  that  Christian  teaching  found  ready  response  in  the 
Greek  and  Roman  world.  Plato  dealt  with  abstract  prin- 


EARLY  CHRISTIAN  PHILOSOPHY 


169 


ciples  and  not  with  historical  processes  originating  in 
specific  individuals  and  going  forward  in  definite  places 
and  times.  The  Logos  was  the  connecting  link  for  integrat¬ 
ing  Greek  philosophy  and  Christianity.  The  Logos  is  the 
divine  reason  which  manifests  itself  in  the  creation  and 
the  order  of  the  world.  God  in  his  fullness  of  being  tran¬ 
scends  the  world,  but  is  immanent  in  the  world  through 
the  Logos.  In  the  Gospel  of  St.  John,  Jesus  is  identified 
with  the  Logos  or  creative  Word  or  Reason  of  God.  The 
divine  creative  Word  which  issues  from  the  Father  is  held 
to  have  been  fully  incarnated  in  Jesus. 

The  Holy  Spirit  is  the  continuously  immanent  activity 
of  God  in  history.  Thus  the  Christian  religion  unites  the 
transcendent  and  eternal  God,  the  Creator-Father,  with 
the  social  and  historical  life  of  man.  God  is,  at  once,  the 
eternal  Creator  of  Nature  and  Father  of  men,  and  the  ever- 
living  and  energizing  ground  of  the  spiritual  life  of  hu¬ 
manity.  Thus  Christianity  synthesizes  the  august  notion 
of  an  Eternal  and  Transcendent  Spirit,  with  the  humanly 
warm  and  inspiring  notion  of  an  immanent,  divine,  spirit¬ 
ual  Energy  which  ever  keeps  company  with  man  in  his 
pilgrimage  through  time,  which  comforts  him  and  guides 
him  (The  Spirit  which  guides  men  into  all  truth,  the 
Paraclete  or  Comforter).  No  other  religion  is,  at  once,  so 
equally  just  to  man’s  impulse  to  revere  the  Majesty  and 
Mystery  of  the  Universe,  to  bow  his  spirit  in  the  presence 
of  the  Eternal,  and  to  his  longing  to  feel  that  the  Eternal 
is  present  in  his  own  life ;  that  it  is  “  closer  to  him  than 
breathing  and  nearer  than  hands  and  feet,”  ever  ready  to 
comfort,  forgive  and  guide  him.  The  doctrine  of  the 
Trinity  arose  to  meet  this  dual  need,  to  find  God  in  human 
life,  in  the  individual’s  experience,  and  in  the  social  and 
historical  order,  without  reducing  Him  to  a  mere  apotheosis 
of  human  aspiration,  to  an  illusory  projection  of  human 
wishes  on  an  unfeeling  and  inexorable  Cosmos. 


170 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


II.  The  Doctrine  of  the  Trinity 

The  foundations  of  Christian  philosophy  were  laid  by 
Origen  of  Alexandria  (185-254  A.  D.).  God,  says  Origen, 
is  pure  spirit,  the  Absolute  Creative  Will,  and  the  Logos  is 
his  expression.  The  Logos  is  a  hypostasis,  a  being,  distinct 
from  the  Father,  but  eternally  generated  from  the  Father. 
The  Platonism  of  Origen  is  evident  in  his  conception  of 
the  Logos  as  being  the  unity  of  all  ideas.  It  is  the  idea  of 
ideas.  The  creation  of  the  world  by  God  is  an  eternal 
process.  It  is  really  the  eternal  procession  of  spirits  from 
God.  Sin  is  the  result  of  freedom,  and  the  fall  into  matter 
is  the  result  of  sin.  Origen  maintains  that  all  souls  shall 
finally  be  redeemed.  Salvation  is  the  eternal  procession  of 
spirits  from  their  alienation  back  to  knowledge  of  and  union 
with  God. 

As  to  the  relation  of  the  Father  and  the  Logos,  it  must 
be  said  that  there  was  a  long  controversy  before  the  ques¬ 
tion  was  settled  by  the  Council  of  Niciea,  A.  D.  325.  The 
Arian  party,  so  called  from  Arius  its  leader,  maintained 
that  the  Logos  was  a  second  divine  principle,  created  by 
and  subordinate  to  the  Father,  and  that  it  was  not  of  the 
same  substance.  The  Son  therefore  is  an  independent 
being  and  is  not  very  God.  The  Son  is  a  creature  who,  by 
his  own  will,  raises  himself  to  moral  unity  with  the  Father. 
Athanasius,  who  flourished  about  338,  and  his  party  con¬ 
tended  against  the  Arians  that  God  verily  entered  human¬ 
ity  through  Christ.  They  held  that  the  work  of  Christ 
would  be  lost  if  God  had  not  entered  into  Christ.  Christ 
is  of  the  same,  not  of  like,  substance  with  the  Father-God. 
Christ  has  come  to  make  us  divine.  Therefore  the  Son  is 
God.  The  Logos  is  eternally  begotten  of  the  Father,  and 
not  created  in  time.  The  Godhead  is  a  unity.  Eternally 
the  Father  implies  the  Son,  as  the  spring  implies  the 
brook  or  as  the  sun  implies  the  light.  Therefore  Christ 


EARLY  CHRISTIAN  PHILOSOPHY 


171 


is  the  veritable  incarnation  of  God.  He  is  of  one  and  the 
same  substance ;  his  nature  consists  of  a  duality  in  unity, 
humanity  and  divinity  in  one  self.  The  intent  of  this  doc¬ 
trine  was  to  save  the  full  value  of  Christ’s  work  of  revela¬ 
tion  and  redemption  for  humanity.  The  Logos,  the  second 
hypostasis  or  person  of  the  Trinity,  was  fully  incarnated 
in  Jesus  the  Christ. 

The  Athanasian  view  triumphed.  Its  final  triumph  took 
place  in  the  year  325  at  the  Council  of  Nicsea.  Most  of  those 
who  passed  upon  the  question  were  utterly  ignorant  of  the 
finer  points  of  the  controversy.  But  the  influence  of  the 
Emperor  on  the  Athanasian  side  meant  the  overthrow  of 
the  Arian  party.  This  triumph  of  the  orthodox  doctrine 
now  raised  new  questions.  If  God  the  Father  was  in 
Christ,  then  he  suffered  when  Christ  suffered.  From  this 
position  (patripassionism)  many  recoiled.  The  discussion 
at  this  point  gave  rise  to  the  question  of  the  relation  of  the 
two  natures  in  Christ,  the  Monophysite  party  holding  that 
there  was  but  one  nature  in  Christ,  the  Docetic  party 
maintaining  that  the  incarnation  was  only  in  appearance. 
The  view  finally  adopted  at  the  Synod  of  Chalcedon  in 
451  was  that  there  are  two  natures  in  one  personality 
in  Christ.  The  next  problem  was  as  to  whether  there  are 
two  wills  or  one  will  in  Christ.  The  doctrine  established 
as  orthodox  was,  that  there  are  two  wills  corresponding 
to  the  twTo  natures,  the  human  will  of  Christ  being  subor¬ 
dinate  to  and  in  harmony  with  the  divine  will.  This  doc¬ 
trine  is  called  dithelitism,  the  heretical  view  monothelitism. 
Finally,  since  the  Holy  Spirit  was  recognized  as  a  distinct 
being,  the  immanent  Spirit  of  God  working  in  individuals 
and  in  the  community  of  the  faithful,  the  question  arose 
as  to  the  relationship  of  the  three  Divine  Beings.  The 
orthodox  view  of  three  distinct  persons  or  beings,  but  so 
united  as  to  form  but  one  God,  was  finally  accepted.  This 
was  a  hard  saying  and  the  school  of  thought  which  gave 


172 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


the  most  plausible  meaning  to  it,  the  Modalists  or  Sabellians, 
held  that  the  three  beings  in  the  Trinity  were  only  three 
distinct  modes  or  relationships  or  phases  of  the  life  activity 
of  the  one  God.1  St.  Augustine,  353-430,  the  greatest  and 
most  influential  theologian  of  the  Christian  Middle  Ages 
and  possibly  of  all  Christian  centuries,  was  a  Modalist. 
He  explained  the  Trinity  as  Divine  power,  wisdom,  and 
goodness,  after  the  analogy  of  the  human  soul  which  is  a 
trinity-in-unity  of  will,  thought,  and  feeling.  For  us,  as 
students  of  philosophy,  the  important  point  is  that  the 
doctrine  of  the  Trinity  was  the  vehicle  by  which  the 
Platonic  philosophy  was  transmitted  to  the  Celtic,  Teutonic, 
and  Slavic  peoples,  and  thus  entered  into  the  thought  of 
the  whole  Christian  world. 

References 

Avey,  Albert  E.,  Headings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  XI. 

*  Encyclopedia  Britannica,  11th  ed.,  Article  “Christianity.” 
Harnack,  Adolf,  The  Expansion  of  Christianity  in  the  First 

Three  Centuries,  and  History  of  Dogma. 

*  Marvin,  Walter  T.,  History  of  European  Philosophy,  Chapter 

XVIII. 

*  McGiffert,  Arthur  Cushman,  The  Apostolic  Age. 

*  Thilly,  Frank,  History  of  Philosophy,  pp.  120-125,  133-155. 
Wernle,  Paul,  The  Beginnings  of  Christianity. 


1  The  Greek  terms  for  person,  Latin  persona,  are  vrrocrTaais  and 
TTpoauirov.  Persona  was  an  unfortunate  translation  of  vi roaraais- 
The  latter  meant,  for  the  creedmakers,  an  essential  character  and 
function  of  God.  The  Nicene  creed  was  concerned  to  affirm  the 
identical  quality  of  Christ’s  essential  character  or  being  and  func¬ 
tion  with  that  of  the  Father;  to  maintain,  in  other  words,  that, 
while  Christ  had  a  distinct  function  and,  therefore,  a  distinct  being, 
he  was  of  essentially  the  same  nature  or  quality,  ovaia,  with  the 
Father;  not  merely  of  similar  nature.  The  word  persona,  and  its 
modern  equivalent  person,  however,  came  to  mean  a  separate  and 
distinct  center  of  conscious  experience  and  deed.  Thus,  if  we  take 
“three  persons”  in  the  modern  sense  of  the  term,  the  doctrine  of  the 
Trinity  is  tritheistic.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  we  take  it  in  the  orig¬ 
inal  sense,  it  means  three  characteristics  or  functions  of  one  super¬ 
personal  Deity,  who  might  be  described  as  a  community  of  persons 
in  the  modern  sense. 


CHAPTER  XII 


MEDIEVAL  PHILOSOPHY 

I.  The  Spirit  of  Scholasticism 

The  period  called  the  Middle  Ages  extends  approxi¬ 
mately  from  450  to  1500.  It  is  a  period  characterized  by 
the  gradual  development  of  a  new  civilization.  The  Ro¬ 
man  Empire  of  the  West  had  suffered  disintegration  from 
internal  complications  and  the  impact  of  the  Teutons. 
Even  in  its  original  home  the  march  of  Roman  civilization 
was  arrested  in  many  vital  respects.  The  medieval  civili¬ 
zation  was  built  in  part  on  the  ruins  of  Roman  civilization, 
and  it  gradually  developed  into  a  type  of  civilization  which 
has  maintained  itself  on  into  modern  days. 

Modern  culture  is  more  like  Greek  culture  than  it  is  like 
medieval  culture.  It  is  rationalistic  in  that  it  rejects  the 
authority  of  organizations  like  the  Church,  custom,  and 
tradition,  and  in  that  it  critically  examines  facts,  beliefs, 
and  theories.  In  medieval  culture  the  principle  of  authority 
rules.  Spiritual  values  are  a  miraculous  contribution  from 
a  higher  and  supernatural  source  coming  into  human  life 
by  way  of  a  Divine  Revelation,  by  the  grace  of  God,  whom 
it  pleased  to  send  his  unique  or  only  Son  to  redeem  men 
from  their  sins.  Modern  culture  is,  by  contrast,  on  the 
whole  naturalistic  or  this- worldly  in  its  attitude.  It  looks 
with  open-eyed  interest  at  the  facts  of  nature,  which  it 
regards  as  worthy  of  consideration  and  proving.  Medieval 
culture,  however,  regards  the  world  of  nature  as  tributary 
to  a  world  of  grace.  The  supernatural,  spiritual  realm  is 

173 


174 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


the  real  realm.  Such  hymns  as  Oh  Mother  Dear,  Jerusalem 
reveal  for  us  the  main  features  of  the  medieval  attitude. 
There  is  embodied  here  that  profound  sense  of  otherworldli¬ 
ness,  we  are  but  “ strangers  and  pilgrims  here  below.”  Our 
true  home  is  in  the  transcendent  realm  of  the  spirit — the 
kingdom  of  God  beyond  the  world  of  nature,  and  into 
Which  we  may  enter  by  means  of  the  instruments  of  grace. 
For  the  child  of  modern  culture  this  point  of  view  has 
largely  lost  its  validity.  Our  eyes  and  interests  are  fixed 
on  another  realm,  this  present  world.  Furthermore,  modern 
culture  is  humanistic  in  the  pagan  or  classical  Greek  sense ; 
it  aims  at  the  fullest  development  of  human  powers  here 
on  earth.  This  world  is  the  locus  of  the  modern  man’s 
interest.  For  the  medieval  thinker,  man  is  a  dual  being 
whose  earthly  interests  are  to  be  completely  subordinated 
to  the  heavenly ;  he  is  a  brand  to  be  snatched  from  the 
burning.  This  is  the  dominant  motif  of  the  whole  period. 

Man’s  vocation  is  not  viewed  as  being  the  process  of 
developing  and  enjoying  all  his  powers  and  interests. 
Man  is  to  subordinate  the  so-called  natural  man  to  the 
spiritual,  the  supernatural,  and  the  superrational.  It  is 
no  exaggeration  to  say  that  the  spirit  of  Neoplatonism  and 
medieval  Christianity  are  identical.  Both  involve  the 
dualistic  conception  of  man  and  the  world,  the  ceaseless 
conflict  between  fleshly  and  spiritual  interests  and  powers, 
and  both  explain  the  presence  of  spirit  on  earth  as  the 
result  of  its  sin  and  consequent  fall.  The  way  of  redemp¬ 
tion  is  the  way  of  escape  from  the  prison  house  of  the 
body  by  a  superrational  process.  It  is  no  accident,  but 
part  of  the  logic  of  thought  and  history,  that  St.  Augustine, 
■whose  thought  dominated  the  whole  medieval  Church,  was 
a  dualist.  Before  becoming  a  Christian,  he  was  a  Mani- 
chaean,  and  still  later  he  was  a  Neoplatonist,  and  even  in 
his  latest  stage  he  adhered  to  the  refined  dualism  of  Neo¬ 
platonism. 


MEDIEVAL  PHILOSOPHY 


175 


Medieval  culture  was  begun  and  built  up  chiefly  through 
the  Church.  This  development  was  peculiarly  facilitated 
by  the  disintegration  of  the  Western  Roman  Empire.  The 
Church  was  well  organized  and  the  Bishop  of  Rome,  by 
virtue  of  the  political  and  historical  prestige  and  power 
of  Rome,  became  the  head  of  the  Church.  The  Church 
remained  the  one  stable,  continuous  form  of  cultural  or¬ 
ganization  during  the  long  period  of  transition  from  the 
ancient  to  the  modern  civilization.  The  Church  wTas  the 
vehicle  by  which  there  was  preserved  something  of  Grasco- 
Roman  culture,  and  through  which  that  culture  was  effect¬ 
ively  brought  to  bear  upon  the  barbarian  peoples.  The 
Church  was  the  instrument  by  which  the  education  of  these 
crude  tribes  was  carried  on.  Deeply  indeed  were  they  im¬ 
pressed  and  awed  by  the  Church ;  by  its  far-flung  organiza¬ 
tion  and  activities,  its  control  over  the  moral  and  spiritual 
life  of  its  adherents,  its  vigor  and  its  splendor.  It  was 
thus  the  Church  that  laid  anew  the  foundations  of  civiliza¬ 
tion  and  began  building  up  a  new  culture.  It  was  the  one 
all-embracing  social  institution.  It  claimed  authority  over 
all  principalities  and  powers ;  it  controlled  the  individual 
from  the  cradle  to  the  grave,  and  beyond  the  grave. 

There  were  no  sharp  lines  between  political,  religious, 
scientific,  and  philosophical  thought  for  the  medieval  mind. 
Theology  was  held  to  be  the  queen  of  sciences  and  phi¬ 
losophy  was  but  her  handmaid.  Political  and  other  species 
of  social  authority  were  held  to  be  derivative. 

The  Church  built  up  a  splendid  civilization,  one  in  which 
industry  and  trade,  no  less  than  political  and  social  life  in 
general,  were  subjected  to  the  control  of  the  moral  prin¬ 
ciples  of  Christianity.  For  several  centuries  the  Church 
successfully  asserted  the  right  of  religion  to  control  and 
give  guiding  principles  to  every  department  of  human  life. 
The  great  religious  foundations,  the  great  cathedrals,  and 
the  scholastic  philosophy  remain  as  monuments  of  a  period 


176 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


when  Western  Europe  came  nearest  to  realizing  that  com¬ 
plete  moralization  of  life  under  the  regime  of  one  governing 
institution,  which  Plato  dreamed  out  so  coherently  in  the 
Republic. 

The  materials  which  the  Church  employed  for  educa¬ 
tional  purposes  were  the  following :  Trivium,  which  gave 
instructions  in  grammar,  logic,  and  rhetoric,  and  Quad- 
rivium,  which  was  a  course  in  music,  arithmetic,  geometry, 
and  astronomy.  These  were  taught  from  compilations. 
There  was  no  direct  acquaintance  with  the  original  Greek. 
There  were,  it  is  true,  translations  of  parts  of  Aristotle’s 
Logic,  together  with  commentaries  by  Boethius.  Plato’s 
Timceus  and  the  writings  of  Cicero  and  of  the  Church 
Fathers  were  also  available  in  the  Latin  tongue.  From 
500  to  1000  A.  D.,  a  period  which  is  called  the  Dark  Ages, 
there  was  only  the  most  elementary  form  of  education,  and 
in  this  long  period  there  was  only  one  isolated  intellectual 
phenomenon  that  relieved  the  blackness  of  this  dark  night. 
He  was  John  Scotus  Erigena,  a  profound  thinker  who 
flourished  about  850.  After  1000  A.  D.,  a  distinct  revival 
of  intellectual  activity  took  place.  Scholastic  philosophy 
began  to  develop  at  this  time.  It  developed  rapidly  and 
culminated  in  the  thirteenth  century.  The  first  great  Scho¬ 
lastic  philosopher  was  Anselm,  who  flourished  about  1075 
and  who  struck  the  keynote  of  Scholastic  philosophy  when 
he  said:  Credo ,  ut  intelligam,  “I  believe  so  that  I  may 
understand.”  Abelard  showed  himself  to  be  a  heretic  by 
assuming  the  standpoint:  Intelligo  ut  credam,  “I  under¬ 
stand  so  that  I  may  believe.” 

Scholastic  philosophy  means,  first,  the  philosophy  taught 
by  the  School  men,  the  great  teachers  of  the  Middle  Ages. 
Second,  since  in  their  teachings  they  aimed  to  be  in  har¬ 
mony  with  the  faith  of  the  Church,  Scholastic  philosophy 
came  to  mean  a  system  of  thought  in  which,  while  much 
free  play  is  given  to  the  analytical  and  speculative  activity 


MEDIEVAL  PHILOSOPHY 


177 


of  reason,  the  starting  points  and  results  are  always  checked 
up  by  reference  to  the  fundamentals  of  Christian  faith. 
The  Scholastics  by  no  means  confined  themselves  to  the 
problems  set  by  the  faith.  They  debated,  with  great  acute¬ 
ness,  on  all  the  basic  metaphysical  and  logical  problems. 

The  Church  had  settled  all  fundamentals  as  to  man’s 
origin,  nature,  and  destiny.  The  Church  had  fixed  the 
metes  and  bounds  of  all  knowledge.  God  created  the 
world  good ;  man  fell,  the  Son  of  God  was  sent  to  redeem 
the  world ;  the  Church  was  the  one  custodian  of  all  the  in¬ 
struments  of  salvation.  Philosophy  was  to  move  and  oper¬ 
ate  only  within  the  limits  of  Church  dogma.  First  of  all 
the  Scholastic  philosopher  bows  to  the  authority  of  the 
Church ;  he  then  proceeds  to  defend  the  whole  doctrine  of 
the  Church.  The  Church  gave  an  intellectual  map  which 
charted  all  things,  the  origin,  destiny,  and  nature  of  every¬ 
thing  in  earth,  below  the  earth,  above  the  earth,  and  in 
heaven  above.  This  doctrine  culminated  in  the  Summa 
TheoJogioe  of  Thomas  Aquinas  (1225-1274).  He  was  the 
great  organizer  of  Scholastic  thought,  and  he  shows  that, 
when  reason  reached  its  limits,  then  revelation  completed 
the  edifice  of  truth.  There  is  no  opposition  between  faith 
and  reason.  The  former  supplements  the  latter.  By  rea¬ 
son  we  can  prove  the  existence  of  God  and  the  immortality 
of  the  soul.  But  the  mysteries  of  the  Trinity  and  Salvation 
are  known  only  through  revelation. 

It  was  about  this  time  that  first-hand  knowledge  of  Aris¬ 
totle  was  to  be  had  for  the  first  time  in  western  Europe.  The 
Greek  text  was  now  brought  in.  This  system  quickened  the 
mind  of  Scholastic  thinkers  and  gave  them  method  and 
scope  which  they  had  not  had  before.  It  is  christianized 
Aristotelianism  that  we  have  in  St.  Thomas  Aquinas.  Al¬ 
though  in  1215  Aristotle  was  condemned,  he  wras,  about 
ninety  years  later  recognized  as  the  precursor  of  Christ, 
and  was  made  the  supreme  authority  in  philosophy. 


178 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


At  the  very  time  that  Scholastic  philosophy  culminated, 
the  seeds  of  decay  were  beginning  to  germinate.  In  Eng¬ 
land,  the  Ionia  of  modern  philosophy,  Duns  Scotus  (1265- 
1308)  denies  that  philosophy  has  the  scope  which  Aquinas 
maintained,  and  he  struggles  to  separate  religion  from 
reason.  He  says  that  the  reason  cannot  prove  either  the 
omnipotence  of  God  or  the  immortality  of  the  soul.  The 
function  of  theology  is  the  purely  practical  one  of  pro¬ 
moting  the  soul’s  salvation.  This  brilliant  dialectician  was 
followed  by  William  of  Occam,1  who  went  still  further  in 
attacking  the  philosophical  presuppositions  of  the  Scholas¬ 
tic  system.  He  holds  that  reason  is  confined  to  the  analysis 
and  combination  of  the  facts  of  sense  perception.  There¬ 
fore  no  articles  of  faith  can  be  rationally  demonstrated. 
At  about  the  same  time  Roger  Bacon  turned  his  back  on 
the  a  priori  method  of  Scholastic  philosophy  and  forcefully 
advocated  the  open-eyed  study  of  nature  and  humanity,  by 
empirical  and  common-sense  methods. 

II.  Realism,  Nominalism,  and  the  Problem  of 

Individuality 

The  preceding  section  has  emphasized  the  outstanding 
characteristics  of  medieval  culture,  by  contrast  with  Greek 
culture.  In  the  twelfth,  thirteenth,  and  fourteenth  cen¬ 
turies,  which  are  the  great  centuries  of  medieval  philosophy, 
the  Scholastic  philosophers  debated  with  great  vigor  three 
great  doctrines,  namely,  realism,  nominalism,  and  indi¬ 
viduality.  The  relation  of  the  universal  to  the  particular 
is  the  quickening  motive  of  the  problem  of  individuality. 
This  problem  is  involved  also  in  the  application  of  the 
first  two  doctrines  to  human  nature.  As  a  correlate  to 
these,  is  the  problem  as  to  whether  the  intellect  or  will  is 
central  to  human  nature. 

The  question  at  issue  between  realism  and  nominalism 

1  Also  spelled  Ockham. 


MEDIEVAL  PHILOSOPHY 


179 


seems  to  us  very  much  like  hair  splitting,  but  such  feeling 
is  due  to  our  ignorance  of  the  real  nature  of  the  con¬ 
troversy.  The  same  problem  is  to-day  the  very  core  of 
the  most  controversial  aspects  of  our  basic  problems.  Medi¬ 
eval  realism  is  the  doctrine  which  argues  that  the  universal, 
in  the  Platonic  sense,  has  an  existence  superior  to  the 
particular,  that  it  exists  eternally,  and  that  it  is  the  cause 
of  the  particular.  The  universal,  or  type,  is  not  only 
logically  prior,  but  is  also  existentially  prior,  to  the  par¬ 
ticular.  The  universal  “humanity”  is  the  cause  of  the 
particular  human  beings.  The  logical  and  existential 
priority  of  the  universal  to  the  particular  is  expressed  by 
the  realist  in  the  phrase,  Universale  ante  rem.  How  do 
these  universals  exist  before  the  things?  The  opinion  of 
the  Scholastic  is  that  they  are  the  forms,  or  types,  according 
to  which  God  creates  particulars.  They  exist  before  par¬ 
ticular  things  in  the  mind  of  God.  The  second  position  of 
realism  as  to  the  nature  and  status  of  the  universals  is 
expressed  in  the  phrase,  Universale  in  re.  These  uni¬ 
versals  are  the  common  nature  or  the  common  essence  of 
particulars.  If  we  have  a  given  lot  of  particulars,  we 
discover  that  the  universal  is  that  which  exists  in  them  as 
their  common  nature.  The  third  phrase,  Universale  post 
rem,  means  that  our  knowledge  of  universals  follows  our 
perception  of  things,  in  the  sense  that,  through  reflection 
upon  sense  data,  we  gradually  arrive  at  a  knowledge  of 
the  eternally  existing,  universal  real.  We  first  perceive 
particulars,  and  then  get  their  common  nature.  We  do  not 
start  out  with  a  ready-made  kit  of  universals  in  our  minds. 

The  position  of  St.  Thomas  Aquinas  is  that  the  uni¬ 
versals  first  exist  in  the  mind  of  God.  The  name  Moderate 
or  Aristotelian  Realism  has  been  applied  to  this  stand¬ 
point.  Extreme  realism  maintains  that  all  individuals  are 
illusions.  It  argues  in  an  Eleatic  fashion  that  there  are 
no  separate  individuals ;  universals  alone  exist.  The  ex- 


180 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


treme  realist  is  therefore  a  pantheist,  and  the  fact  that 
such  a  position  is  incompatible  with  Christianity  doubtless 
deterred  many  from  espousing  this  standpoint.  Why  was 
this  question  of  such  consuming  interest?  To  show  the  in¬ 
terest  of  it  then  and  now,  it  is  necessary  to  contrast  the 
standpoint  of  moderate  realism  with  that  of  nominalism. 
Realism  views  the  universals  as  being  superior  realities. 
Nominalism  savs  that  universals  are  nothing  but  wTords, 
flatus  vocis,  empty  sounds.  Roscellinus,  the  first  nominal¬ 
ist,  said  individuals  alone  exist.  Applied  to  the  Trinity  this 
meant  that  there  were  three  Gods.  It  was  not  till  the  time 
of  William  of  Occam,  who  flourished  about  1330,  that 
nominalism  had  its  next  great  advocate.  He  says  that  only 
the  particulars  are  real ;  the  universals  are  mere  names. 
There  is  no  such  thing  in  reality  as  goodness,  justice,  or 
triangularity.  The  world  consists  of  an  aggregate  of  par¬ 
ticular  instances,  and  what  we  call  universals  are  names 
that  we  attach  to  the  similarity  between  objects.  We  see 
objects  and  we  note  that  they  have  certain  common  fea¬ 
tures.  The  generic  term  humanity  is  a  name  for  those 
that  have  certain  common  features.  We  give  these  generic 
terms  not  only  to  objects,  but  also  to  various  acts  and 
processes  which  are  like  each  other.  Nominalism  is  not  a 
defunct  doctrine.  It  is  what  is  known  in  modern  thought 
as  extreme  empiricism.  Such  empiricism  holds  that  what 
we  perceive  through  the  senses  is  the  only  reality  that 
exists.  What  you  think  is  but  a  copy  of  what  you  perceive. 

Realism  is  a  term  frequently  used  with  regard  to  a 
movement  in  literature,  and  in  this  connection  it  means 
that  art  is  to  embody  things  as  they  are  without  selection 
or  evaluation.  Medieval  realism  has  a  different  meaning 
from  this.  It  means  that  universals  are  real.  Realism  in 
literature  is  just  the  opposite  of  this  type  of  realism.  The 
fundamental  doctrines  of  the  Church  were  given  a  philo¬ 
sophical  basis  by  the  realistic  formula.  God  is  one  sub- 


MEDIEVAL  PHILOSOPHY 


181 


stance  in  three  persons.  The  Church  also  taught  that  the 
whole  of  humanity  was  involved  in  the  consequences  of 
Adam’s  transgression.  Humanity  is  one,  and  so  the  fall 
of  Adam  entailed  the  whole  human  race.  “For  as  in 
Adam  all  die,  even  so  in  Christ  shall  all  be  made  alive.” 
We  are  all  parts  of  a  whole,  and  not  separate  individuals. 
All  men  are  saved  in  Christ.  He  is  the  typical  man,  the 
universal  man,  present  in  all  men.  The  Church  holds  that 
it  itself  is  made  after  a  pattern  laid  up  in  heaven,  and, 
because  of  this,  the  Church  is  more  real  than  the  individuals 
which  compose  it.  This  realistic  motive  is  also  the  philo¬ 
sophical  basis  of  the  Church’s  doctrine  of  the  Lord’s 
Supper. 

The  culture  of  the  Church  conceived  all  existence  to  be 
arranged  in  hierarchical  order.  At  the  top  of  the  hierarchy 
is  God,  and  next,  the  angels.  In  God  and  the  heavenly 
world  are  to  be  found  all  the  types  of  earthly  existence. 
After  the  fashion  of  Dante,  our  earthly  existence  is  viewed 
as  being  only  an  allegory  of  the  divine  order.  The  earthly 
order  is  only  a  preparatory  stage  for  the  celestial  order. 

If  the  world  of  universals  is  thus  so  much  more  real 
than  the  particulars,  the  latter  order  is  to  be  saved  only 
by  the  descent  of  the  universals  into  this  order,  and  thus 
is  the  earthly  order  transfigured  into  the  semblance  of 
the  divine.  If  the  universals  are  so  much  more  real  than 
the  particulars,  then  what  is  to  become  of  the  particulars  ? 
We  feel  ourselves  to  be  separate  beings.  We  have  each 
his  own  inaccessible  citadel  of  personality.  Each  person 
is  an  isolated,  unique  being.  How  often  do  we  feel  that 
nobody  understands  us !  Uniqueness,  isolation,  privacy — 
these  are  marks  of  our  personality.  What  becomes  of  this 
if  the  universal  is  the  more  real?  Our  feeling  of  freedom 
and  our  sense  of  responsibility  point  to  the  reality  of  the 
individual.  How  can  this  be?  Aquinas  said  that  matter 
is  the  principle  of  individuation.  As  forms,  all  souls  will 


182 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


be  identical,  but  as  embodied  they  are  different.  We  are 
individuals,  therefore,  in  consequence  of  our  bodies.  To 
this  position  Scotus  replies,  that  when  we  slough  off  this 
mortal  coil,  then  we  must  lose  our  individuality.  Scotus 
said  that  it  is  not  in  the  fact  of  the  mere  embodiment  of 
the  soul  that  individuality  is  effected.  It  is  not  body  that 
makes  individuality,  for  God  has  no  matter  in  Him.  Each 
individual  is  real  as  a  soul.  Each  soul  has  its  hcecceitas , 
is  an  individual  this.  Each  thing  is  a  unique  thing  and 
has  its  own  being.  The  fundamental  thing  in  individuality 
is  will,  says  Scotus,  and  in  this  he  anticipates  current 
psychology  and  philosophy.  But  Aquinas  held  that  in¬ 
tellect  is  prior  to  will,  and  in  doing  this  he  is  doing  just 
what  we  would  expect  him  to  do  in  the  light  of  the  rest  of 
his  system. 

The  question  as  to  the  primacy  of  the  will  or  the  in¬ 
tellect  comes  out  of  the  preceding  inquiry,  that  is,  as  to 
universals.  Will  is  primary  for  Scotus,  and  in  consequence 
of  this  he  defends  free  will,  taking  the  indeterministic 
position,  man  has  the  power  of  free  choice.  As  time  went 
on  nominalism  gathered  constantly  increasing  momentum 
and  in  William  of  Occam  we  have  one  of  the  acutest  and 
subtlest  thinkers  championing  the  cause  of  nominalism. 
Universals  exist  only  in  the  thinking  mind,  says  Occam. 
Individual  things  alone  are  real.  Universals  are  formed 
in  the  mind  by  abstracting  the  common  features  of  the 
particular  concrete  things  perceived,  and  by  making  lin¬ 
guistic  symbols  to  denote  the  results  of  abstraction.  A 
universal  is  a  mental  artefact,  necessary  for  discourse. 
Occam  is  an  out-and-out  empiricist.  With  the  increasing 
interest  in  the  study  of  nature  and  with  the  development 
of  nationalities,  which  involved  the  throwing  off  of  ecclesi¬ 
astical  and  political  authority,  there  is  a  constantly  grow¬ 
ing  interest  in  the  nominalistic  standpoint.  The  great 
development  of  dialects  and  languages,  and  the  emergence 


MEDIEVAL  PHILOSOPHY  183 

of  the  empirical  study  of  nature  fostered  nominalism,  or 
empiricism. 

The  empiricist  regards  concepts  as  artificial  abstractions 
which  are  derived  from  the  inspection  of  particulars.  Con¬ 
cepts  are  mere  names  for  the  empiricist.  The  basic  mo¬ 
tive  of  this  view  is  the  fact  that  he  is  prone  to  say 
that  the  psychological  steps  by  which  we  get  knowledge 
is  all  there  is  to  knowledge.  He  does  not  seem  to  be  con¬ 
scious  of  the  difficulty  involved  in  the  assumption  of  laws 
and  abstractions  which  are  valid  for  our  own  experience, 
but  which  have  nothing  in  nature,  as  perceived  through 
the  senses,  corresponding  to  them.  In  science  we  con¬ 
stantly  classify  facts  and  correlate  them  causally.  Every 
exact  law  of  science  presupposes  that  nature  is  a  kind  of 
crystallized  mathematics.  We  generalize  so  as  to  fore¬ 
cast  and  predict,  and  this  certainly  implies  that  there  is  a 
rational  structure  in  nature.  But  nominalism  reduces 
science  to  a  set  of  symbols  that  do  not  represent  reality. 
It  makes  reality  a  chaotic  mass  or  aggregate  of  isolated 
particulars.  Many  people  to-day  smile  at  these  old  con¬ 
troversies.  They  do  not  realize  that  the  same  controversy 
is  involved  in  the  existence  of  the  state.  Are  we  isolated 
individuals?  Is  society  simply  a  mass  of  separate  indi¬ 
viduals  ?  This  is  the  position  of  anarchy.  There  are 
thousands  in  our  own  republic  who  do  not  realize  the 
significance  of  this  conception  with  reference  to  the  nature 
of  the  state.  For  very  many  the  state  is  only  a  milk 
bucket.  On  the  other  hand,  there  is  the  equally  vicious 
and  defective  view  that  all  individuals  exist  for  the  state. 
The  question  to-day  is  as  to  where  lies  the  seat  of  a  ra¬ 
tional  and  just  authority  of  society  over  the  individual. 
Thus  the  old  question  of  Scholasticism  is  the  central  ques¬ 
tion  of  to-day.  Are  the  state,  justice,  merely  empty  names  ? 
Is  society  only  a  horde  of  self-seeking  individuals?  Plato 
represents  the  state  as  the  magnification  or  projection  of 


184 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


the  individual.  It  is  the  great  instrument  for  the  develop¬ 
ment  of  the  soul  of  man.  The  anarchist  would  achieve  the 
welfare  of  man  by  shattering  the  state  and  all  social  au¬ 
thorities  into  fragments.  He  would  get  harmony  through 
the  spontaneous  action  of  the  individual  atoms  in  society. 

References 

*  Avey,  Albert  E.,  Readings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  XII. 

*  Catholic  Encyclopaedia,  articles  on  all  above-mentioned  sub¬ 

jects. 

Dante,  Divine  Comedy,  and  the  New  Life  (translation  by  C.  E. 
Norton). 

*  De  Wulf,  Maurice,  History  of  Mediaeval  Philosophy. 

Essays  Commemorative  of  Roger  Bacon,  edited  by  Little. 
Hastings,  James,  Encyclopaedia  of  Religion  and  Ethics,  articles 

on  Abelard,  Anselm,  Aquinas,  and  Scholasticism. 

Poole,  R.  L.,  Illustrations  of  Mediaeval  Thought. 

Rashdall,  Hastings,  Universities  of  Europe  in  the  Middle  Ages. 

*  Rickaby,  Joseph,  Scholasticism. 

*  Rogers,  Arthur  K.,  History  of  Philosophy,  pp.  197-222. 

St.  Anselm  (translation  by  Deane),  Proslogium  and  Mono - 
logium  (Open  Court  Series). 

St.  Thomas  Aquinas  (translation  by  Rickaby),  Of  God  and 
His  Creatures,  and  Summa  Theologies  (translated  under 
direction  of  the  Dominican  Order). 

Taylor,  Henry  Osborn,  The  Mediaeval  Mind,  Chapters  XXXV- 
XLIV. 

*  Thilly,  Frank,  History  of  Philosophy,  pp.  155-163,  166-172, 

188-218. 

Thomas  a  Kempis,  Imitation  of  Christ. 

*  Turner,  Wm.,  History  of  European  Philosophy. 

*  Weber,  Alfred,  History  of  Philosophy,  pp.  201-261. 

*  Windelband,  W.,  History  of  Philosophy,  pp.  263-347. 

Note. — Scholasticism  has  had  a  vigorous  revival  since  about 
1880.  This  is  especially  true  of  Thomism  (the  system  of  Thomas 
Aquinas).  Its  most  active  center  up  to  August,  1914,  was  the 
University  of  Louvain.  This  revival  is  confined  to  the  Roman 
Catholic  Church. 


PART  II 


THE  CHIEF  PROBLEMS  AND  STANDPOINTS 
OF  MODERN  PHILOSOPHY 


CHAPTER  XIII 


MODERN  PHILOSOPHY:  ITS  SPIRIT,  ITS  CHIEF  PROBLEMS,  AND 

ITS  STANDPOINTS 

Modern  philosophy  did  not  come  into  being  suddenly. 
Even  back  in  the  thirteenth  and  fourteenth  centuries, 
men  like  Roger  Bacon,  Duns  Scotus,  and  William  of 
Occam,  advocated  the  separation  of  philosophy  from  the¬ 
ology.  In  this  way  these  men  claimed  for  philosophy 
the  right  of  free  and  independent  inquiry,  while  at  the 
same  time  they  recognized  the  practical  value  of  theology. 

The  first  really  modern  system  is  that  of  Giordano 
Bruno,  a  man  burned  at  the  stake  in  Rome  in  the  year  1600. 
He  was  burned  as  a  heretic,  and  thus  suffered  martyrdom 
for  the  cause  of  free  knowledge  and  science.  Three  hun¬ 
dred  years  later,  a  great  bronze  statue  was  erected  to  him. 
His  work  is  penetrated  through  and  through  by  the  idea 
of  the  infinitude  of  the  universe.  God  is  held  by  him  to 
be  the  immanent  unity  of  the  universe,  the  all-pervading 
soul  of  things.  God  is  the  unity  of  opposites,  the  one  in 
the  many.  He  conceives  of  the  material  world  as  being 
made  up  of  indivisible  monads,  and  that  there  are  physical 
and  psychical  monads.  These  monads  are  the  elements 
of  which  the  world  is  made. 

The  first  scientifically  developed  system  is  that  of  Des¬ 
cartes,  1596-1650.  The  poetic  impulse  of  Bruno  is  lacking 
in  Descartes,  who  is  a  rigorous  thinker.  Soon  after  Des¬ 
cartes  developed  his  system,  Hobbes  worked  out  his  ma¬ 
terialism,  and,  in  rapid  succession,  we  have  given  us  the 
system  of  Spinoza,  Leibnitz,  Locke,  and  Berkeley.  The 

187 


188  THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 

seventeenth  century  was  a  period  of  great  metaphysical 
systems. 

All  modern  philosophy  is  rationalistic.  It  rejects  the 
authority  of  tradition  and  works  independently  of  ecclesi¬ 
astical  dogmas  and  religious  beliefs.  Its  one  standpoint 
is  that  of  rational  inquiry  into  nature  and  the  meaning  of 
experience.  This  revolt  against  authority  and  tradition 
is  seen  in  other  fields  than  science  and  philosophy.  In  the 
Reformation  movement  we  have  the  rejection  of  the  au¬ 
thority  of  the  Pope  in  ecclesiastical  and  religious  matters, 
and  particularly  the  rejection  of  his  right  to  interfere  in 
matters  of  state.  The  Reformation  is  thus  partly  religious 
and  partly  political.  This  revolt  goes  hand  in  hand  with 
the  development  of  nationality  and  of  regional  government, 
and  the  beginnings  of  movements  toward  democracy. 

The  demand  for  representative  government  was  success¬ 
ively  successful  in  England,  France,  and  America.  Out 
of  this  movement  developed  the  doctrine  of  the  natural 
and  inalienable  rights  of  man,  a  doctrine  which  was  ex¬ 
pressed  in  its  most  classic  form  at  the  time  of  the  French 
Revolution  and  the  American  Revolution.  The  democratic 
movement,  in  politics  and  industry,  is  the  offspring  of  the 
same  spirit,  which  rejects  traditional  forms  of  authority 
and  proclaims  the  right  of  the  individual  to  free  thought 
and  self -development.  The  doctrine  of  the  natural  rights 
of  man  goes  back  to  Aristotle,  the  Stoics  and  Roman  Impe¬ 
rial  Law. 

The  chief  social  and  cultural  influences  which  resulted 
in  modern  thought  are  the  following : 

1.  The  influence  of  the  Crusades  in  bringing  Western 
Europe  into  contact  with  the  culture  of  the  Saracens. 

2.  The  culture  of  the  Renaissance.  Here  we  have  the 
spirit  of  humanism  and  naturalism  quickened  by  first-hand 
acquaintance  with  the  classics  of  Greece. 


MODERN  PHILOSOPHY 


189 


3.  The  growth  of  the  spirit  of  nationality,  or  a  sense  of 
the  rights  of  the  local,  social,  and  political  organizations. 

4.  The  influence  of  the  Reformation  in  the  matter  of 
the  rejection  of  papal  authority  in  matters  of  religious 
observance  and  belief. 

5.  The  influence  of  the  doctrine  of  natural  rights. 

6.  The  new  discoveries  in  geography  and  natural 
science. 

Of  these  influences,  the  new  natural  science  is  by  far  the 
most  potent. 

The  second  great  characteristic  of  the  spirit  of  modern 
philosophy  is  that  it  develops  in  the  closest  association  with 
special  sciences.  Until  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
mathematics,  astronomy,  and  physics  not  only  exercised  a 
great  influence  upon  philosophy ;  they  even  determined  the 
very  structure  of  philosophy,  and  in  the  nineteenth  century 
the  biological  sciences,  with  their  all-embracing  generaliza¬ 
tion  of  evolution,  molded  new  types  of  philosophical  doc¬ 
trine.  This  close  relation  of  the  sciences  and  philosophy 
in  modern  times  is  shown  by  the  fact  that  many  of  the 
leaders  in  the  development  of  science  have  been  philoso¬ 
phers.  Descartes  was  a  great  mathematician  and  physicist. 
Analytical  geometry  is  largely  a  creation  of  his  genius. 
Leibnitz,  an  eminent  mathematician,  geologist,  physicist, 
chemist,  comparative  philologist,  philosopher,  invented  the 
calculus,  and  in  this  way  we  see  the  organic  relation  be¬ 
tween  philosophy  and  science  in  his  case.  Locke  and 
Hume  were  analytical  psychologists,  and  furthermore,  they 
were  political  thinkers  or  social  philosophers.  It  is  not 
until  William  James  that  we  have  another  English-writing 
psychologist  who  ranks  with  them.  Hume  was  an  emi¬ 
nent  historian.  Kant  was  a  mathematician  and  a  physi¬ 
cist;  he  formulated  the  nebular  hypothesis.  It  is  only 
our  second  or  third  rate  philosophers  and  scientists  that 
fail  to  see  the  close  relation  between  science  and  philosophy. 


190 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


Another  outstanding  characteristic  of  modern  thought 
is  the  marked  development  and  emphasis  of  empirical  or 
inductive  methods  of  inquiry.  In  the  ancient  schools,  par¬ 
ticularly  the  Aristotelian  and,  later,  the  Alexandrian 
schools,  the  collection  and  interpretation  of  the  facts  of 
nature  were  not  neglected.  But  the  Romans  were  deficient 
in  free  scientific  curiosity,  and  in  the  Christian  Middle 
Ages  it  was  generally  assumed  that  the  church  had  in  its 
possession  a  complete  set  of  universal  propositions  from 
which  could  be  inferred,  by  deduction,  all  the  most  im¬ 
portant  truths. 

The  coincidental  disintegration  of  the  principle  of  au¬ 
thority  and  the  discovery  of  the  manifold  complexity  and 
interest  of  nature  brought  the  problems  of  the  correct 
methods  of  observation  and  classification  of  particular 
facts,  and  of  drawing  general  conclusions  from  them,  into 
the  foreground.  These  are  the  problems  of  inductive  or 
empirical  logic,  as  contrasted  with  the  formal  or  purely 
deductive  logic  which  Aristotle  had,  with  such  marvelous 
completeness,  formulated. 

It  is  interesting  to  note  that,  while  continental  thinkers 
contributed  most,  up  to  the  time  of  Newton,  to  the  develop¬ 
ment  of  mathematical  instruments  of  inquiry,  it  was  Eng¬ 
lish  thinkers  who  gave  the  most  powerful  impetus  to  the 
theory  of  inductive  inference.  Roger  Bacon  (1214-1292) 
and  Francis  Bacon  (1561-1626)  in  his  Novum  Organum 
and  The  Great  Installation  were  the  prophets  of  the  new 
inductive  science.  Their  work  was  continued  by  Locke  and 
Hume  in  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries,  and  by 
William  Herschel,  William  Whewell,  John  Stuart  Mill, 
and  others  in  the  nineteenth  century. 

The  two  chief  problems  of  induction  are:  (1)  What  are 
the  conditions  of  correct  observation?  and  (2)  What  are  the 
conditions  of  correct  generalization  or  the  formulation  of 
universals,  from  the  facts?  Francis  Bacon,  by  his  dis- 


MODERN  PHILOSOPHY 


191 


cussion  of  the  four  types  of  idols  or  mental  blinders  which 
distort  human  observation,  contributed  much  to  classify 
the  conditions  of  correct  observation.  These  are  the  idols 
of  the  tribe  (the  prejudice  of  the  human  species,  due  to 
passion,  haste,  habit,  et  cetera)  ;  the  idols  of  the  market¬ 
place ,  due  to  the  current  shibboleths  or  catchpenny 
phrases;  the  idols  of  the  theater ,  due  to  false  systems  of 
philosophy  which,  he  says,  are  so  many  plays ;  and  the 
idols  of  the  cave ,  or  personal  weaknesses  of  the  individual. 
Bacon  counsels  us  to  be  on  the  lookout  for  negative  instances 
and  go  slowly  in  theorizing.  He  opposes  speculation  and 
deductive  logic ;  in  these  respects  he  swings  too  far  in  his 
reaction  against  medievalism. 

Bacon  did  not  contribute  much  to  the  formulation  of 
methods  of  generalization ;  indeed  he  underestimated  the 
importance  of  hypotheses  as  a  stimulus  and  guide  in  sci¬ 
entific  inquiry.  To  David  Hume,  Sir  John  Herschel,  and 
John  Stuart  Mill  belong  the  credit  of  having  formulated 
the  specific  methods  of  determining  causal  relations.  In 
his  “ Rules  by  which  to  judge  of  causes  and  effects”  in 
the  Treatise  of  Human  Nature,  Book  I,  Part  II,  Section 
XY,  Hume  formulated  with  remarkable  clarity  and  con¬ 
ciseness  the  canons  for  the  methods  of  agreement,  differ¬ 
ence,  and  concomitant  variations  which  are  recognized  as 
being,  with  the  method  of  residues,  the  fundamental  meth¬ 
ods  of  causal  determination.1 

The  significant,  new  thing  in  the  background  of  modern 
philosophy — the  novel  standpoint  in  thought  that  shapes 
the  point  of  view  of  much  of  modern  thought,  is  the  de¬ 
velopment  of  a  mechanical  view  of  the  world.  It  is  the 
conception  of  nature  as  a  vast  mechanism,  infinite  both 
in  extent  and  in  the  complexity  of  its  details.  At  the  same 
time  it  is  a  mechanism  whose  fundamental  principles  of 

i  Compare  any  elementary  treatise  on  logic,  for  example,  Creighton, 
Sellars,  or  Hibben. 


192 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


operation  are  known.  Nature  is  viewed  as  a  self -running 
mechanism.  Four  men  of  the  highest  importance  have 
elaborated  this  doctrine.  They  are  Copernicus,  Kepler, 
Galileo,  and  Newton.  Copernicus,  in  his  astronomical 
theory,  originated  what  is  perhaps  the  most  revolutionary 
thought  of  the  ages.  His  theory  loosened  all  the  founda¬ 
tions  of  science  and  religion.  Kepler  formulated  the  laws 
of  planetary  motion.  Galileo  gave  an  experimental  foun¬ 
dation  to  this  theory  and  established  many  principles  of 
modern  physics.  In  addition  to  this  he  made  many  inven¬ 
tions  of  apparatus  for  better  observation.  One  of  the 
many  things  which  he  worked  out  was  the  determination 
of  the  concept  of  acceleration.  In  this  way  he  showed  that 
the  rate  of  falling  bodies  is  not  a  function  of  mass.  Thus, 
at  this  time,  a  dogma  which  was  accepted  from  the  days  of 
Aristotle  was  shown  to  be  invalid.  Newton,  by  his  formu¬ 
lation  of  the  laws  of  motion  and  the  principle  of  gravita¬ 
tion,  was  able  to  bind  all  into  one  comprehensive  synthesis. 
His  formula  is  a  generalization  which  involves  the  result 
of  the  researches  made  on  falling  bodies,  the  pendulum, 
and  the  planets. 

Galileo  had  a  clear  conception  of  scientific  method.  He 
argues  that  what  we  can  measure  we  can  know.  The  book 
of  the  universe  is  written  in  mathematical  characters.  All 
changes  in  nature  are  the  results  of  movements  of  atoms, 
but  the  secondary  qualities  of  bodies  are  only  subjective. 
In  the  year  1633,  Galileo  was  forced  to  recant,  but  after 
having  made  his  recantation,  he  raised  his  eyes  to  the 
stars,  and  while  looking  into  that  far  off  region  which  he 
knew  so  well,  he  involuntarily  exclaimed,  “And  yet  it 
moves.”  The  background  of  modern  philosophy  is  this 
development  of  the  mechanical  conception  of  the  universe. 
The  medieval  philosopher  viewed  nature  animistically  and 
teleologically.  A  problem  that  becomes  acute  for  the  mod¬ 
ern  philosopher  is  this:  If  nature  is  blind  and  insensate; 


MODERN  PHILOSOPHY 


193 


if  all  that  takes  place  in  nature  is  the  result  of  mechanical 
movements,  and  if  all  the  motions  of  the  heavenly  bodies 
and  all  the  changes  that  take  place  in  the  universe  can  be 
explained  without  assuming  any  interference  of  mind,  then 
what  becomes  of  mind,  of  the  soul  and  spirit,  in  the  uni¬ 
verse  ?  Are  these  not  superfluous  and  antiquated  concep¬ 
tions?  The  first  and  greatest  problem  of  modern  phi¬ 
losophy  is  this :  What  is  the  character  of  reality  ?  and  how 
are  the  soul  and  body  to  be  related?  If  nature  is  only  an 
infinite  machine,  if  this  is  all  that  there  really  is,  then 
spirit  seems  to  be  a  mere  by-product  of  this  machine,  and 
science,  language,  art,  music,  and  religion,  seem  to  be  re¬ 
duced  to  the  status  of  glandular  secretions.  If  nature  is 
only  mechanism,  then  there  is  no  ground  for  assuming  that 
purpose  operates,  and  we  must  abandon  entirely  the  tele¬ 
ological  conceptions. 

In  the  physics  and  cosmology  of  scholastic  philosophy, 
as  in  those  of  Plato  and  Aristotle,  things  and  events  in 
nature  are  conceived  and  explained  in  terms  drawn  from 
human  purpose  and  will.  Brute  matter  is  subservient  to 
purpose,  to  a  good.  In  modern  physics  and  cosmology  all 
changes  are  explained  in  terms  of  the  push  and  pull  of 
blindly  operating  mass  particles  moving  in  space.  Whereas 
in  the  former  system,  events  are  due,  chiefly,  to  conscious 
or  unconscious  striving  for  a  good,  in  the  latter  system, 
natural  occurrences  are  the  mathematical  and  inevitable 
resultants  of  the  previous  configuration  of  mass  particles 
and  their  motions.  In  the  former  conception  nature  is 
impelled  to  achieve  ends  foreseen,  or,  at  least,  felt,  to  be 
good.  In  the  latter  conception  whatever  happens  now  is 
the  inescapable  consequence  of  a  blind  push  from  the  past. 
The  future  is  not  a  real  factor  in  determining  the  char¬ 
acter  of  the  present;  the  latter  is  the  inevitable  echo  of  the 
past. 

The  great  seventeenth  century  systems  are  attempts  to 


194 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


answer,  in  all  the  logically  possible  ways,  the  question  as 
to  what  is  the  relation  of  mind  and  body,  spirit  and  matter. 

References 

Berry,  Short  History  of  Astronomy,  pp.  76-409. 

Burkhardt,  J.  C.,  The  Civilization  of  the  Renaissance  in  Italy. 

*  Bury,  J.  B.,  History  of  Freedom  of  Thought. 

Cajori,  F.,  History  of  Physics,  and  History  of  Mathematics. 
Cambridge  Modern  History,  Vol.  I. 

Galileo,  Dialogues  Concerning  Two  New  Sciences. 

*  Hoffding,  Harald,  History  of  Modern  Philosophy,  Yol.  I., 

pp.  103-148,  167-183. 

*  Lecky,  W.  E.  H.,  History  of  the  Rise  and  Influence  of  Ration¬ 

alism. 

Lindsay,  T.  M.,  History  of  the  Reformation. 

*  Marvin,  W.  T.,  History  of  European  Philosophy,  Chapter  XXI. 
Rogers,  A.  K.,  English  and  American  Philosophy  Since  1800. 

*  Sedgwick,  W.  T.,  and  Tyler,  H.  W.,  A  Short  History  of 

Science,  Chapters  X-XIII. 

*  Thilly,  Frank,  History  of  Philosophy,  pp.  221-240,  250-254. 
Whewell,  Wm.,  History  of  the  Inductive  Sciences. 


CHAPTER  XIV 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  REALITY 

In  this  problem,  which  occupies  the  center  of  the  stage 
in  all  the  great  epochs  of  modern  philosophy,  there  are 
two  main  questions  at  issue.:  (1)  What  is  the  nature  or 
character  of  that  which  is  real?  (2)  What  is  the  relation 
of  the  part  to  the  whole,  or,  what  is  the  place  of  the  indi¬ 
vidual  in  the  Universe?  The  central  interest  in  this  latter 
question  for  us  is,  What  is  the  place  of  personality  in  the 
universe?  In  connection  with  this  latter  question  emerge 
the  problems  of  the  meaning  of  personality,  freedom,  and 
immortality. 

% 

The  first  problem  is  to  determine  what  is  the  abiding 
substance  of  things,  or,  what  are  the  substances f  It  is  in 
terms  of  the  concept  of  substance  that  the  four  typical 
answers  to  this  question  were  given  in  the  seventeenth  cen¬ 
tury.  By  substance  was  meant  that  which  is  permanent, 
that  which  exists  on  its  own  account.  Substance  is  con¬ 
ceived  as  independent  and  self-existent.  “  Substance  is  that 
which  exists  in  itself  and  requires  nothing  else  in  order  to 
exist”  (Descartes).  In  the  textbooks  on  metaphysics,  the 
ordinary  classification  of  problems  and  theories  is  as  fol¬ 
lows  :  ontology,  cosmology,  and  psychology.  Ontology  is  the 
theory  of  the  nature  of  being  or  reality.  Cosmology  is  the 
theory  of  the  structure  of  the  universe.  I  find  it  un¬ 
profitable  to  thus  separate  ontology  and  cosmology.  The 
questions  of  the  nature  of  being  and  of  the  structure  of  the 
universe  are  obviously  but  two  ways  of  stating  the  same 
problem.  Metaphysical  psychology  is  the  theory  of  the 

195 


196 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


structure  and  nature  of  the  soul  or  self.  But  the  problems 
of  the  self  are  evidently  subordinate  divisions  of  general 
metaphysics.  While  we  may  fix  our  attention,  for  the 
time,  on  the  general  problems  of  metaphysics,  or  on  the 
special  problems  of  external  nature  or  human  nature,  all 
these  problems  are  interlocked  as  parts  of  metaphysics. 

What  is  the  substance  or  permanent  qualitative  nature 
of  things?  We  have  five  types  of  answers  to  this  question: 

1.  Dualism. 

2.  Materialism 

3.  Spiritualism  or  Idealism 

4.  The  Identity  Theory 

5.  Neutral  Monism 

Dualism  is  the  common  sense  theory,  and  has  its  classical 
formulation  in  Descartes  (1596-1650).  This  theory  is  held 
by  Locke  (1632-1704),  Kant  (1724-1804),  McDougall, 
Bergson,  and  many  others.  This  theory  rests  on  the 
assumption  that  there  are  two  substances,  namely,  mind 
and  body  in  man,  spirit  and  matter  in  the  universe  at 
large.  The  three  remaining  theories  are  all  monistic. 
Materialism  is  the  view  which  we  find  in  Hobbes  (1588- 
1679),  Priestley  (1733-1804),  Holbach  (b.  1789),  La 
Mettrie  (1709-1751),  Buchner  (1824-1889),  and  Haeckel 
(b.  1834).  There  is  one  substance,  namely,  matter  in  mo¬ 
tion.  Spiritualism  or  Idealism  assumes  that  the  substance 
of  things  consists  of  minds,  their  activities,  and  their 
contents.  The  leading  representatives  of  this  view  are 
Berkeley  (1685-1753),  Leibnitz  (1646-1716),  Fichte  (1762- 
1814),  Hegel  (1770-1831),  Schopenhauer  (1788-1860), 
Lotze  (1817-1881),  Green  (1836-1882),  Bradley  (b.  1846), 
Bosanquet  (b.  1848),  and  Boyce  (1855-1915).  The  Identity 
theory  is  the  doctrine  that  reality  is  neither  physical  nor 
mental — it  is  both  physical  and  mental.  Reality  has  these 
two  aspects,  and  these  two  aspects  are  parallel  manifesta¬ 
tions  of  the  same  underlying  substance.  Representatives 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  REALITY 


197 


of  the  identity  theory  are  Spinoza  (1632-1677),  Schelling 
(1775-1854),  and  Spencer  (1820-1903).  These  views  are 
all  designated  qualitative  monisms ,  inasmuch  as  they  main¬ 
tain  that  there  is  only  one  kind  of  being.1 

Somewhat  remotely  akin  to  the  Identity  Theory  is  the 
doctrine  of  Neutral  Monism,  or  reality,  as  “pure  experi¬ 
ence’  ’  of  which  the  physical  and  the  psychical  are  but 
special  configurations  or  complexes.  This  view  is  advanced 
by  Avenarius  (1843-1896),  Mach  (1838-1916),  and  James 
(1842-1910).  It  has  been  further  developed  by  certain  of 
the  New  Realists  of  to-day,  and  is  favored  now  (1922)  by 
Bertrand  Russell.  See  Chapter  XXI. 

The  second  question  referred  to  above  is  that  as  to  the 
relation  of  the  parts  to  the  whole.  What  is  the  relation 
of  the  unity  of  the  universe  to  the  parts  that  are  in  it? 
We  find  here  two  main  types  of  theory,  namely,  Monism 
or  Singularism  and  Pluralism.  Here  the  question  is  not, 
how  many  kinds  of  being  there  are,  but  how  many  beings 
are  there.  Spinoza  is  a  monist  of  both  kinds.  There  is 
for  him  only  one  ultimately  real  being  and  only  one  kind 
of  being.  In  many  respects  this  Spinozistic  view  is  the 
doctrine  of  Hegel,  Royce,  Bradley,  and  Bosanquet.  For 
all  of  these  there  is  only  one,  ultimately  real,  absolute, 
all-inclusive  being.  The  pluralistic  theory  is  that  finite 
beings,  especially  human  personalities,  have  a  distinct  and 
separate  existence  and  that  they  are  not  parts  of  God.  They 
are  private  and  unique  beings,  but  not,  however,  without 
relations  to  one  another.  It  is  from  this  point  of  view 
that  we  see  the  metaphysical  significance  of  the  different 
types  of  philosophy  of  the  State.  The  State  for  the 


1  It  should  be  said,  in  qualification  of  the  above  statements,  that 
Bergson,  in  his  doctrine  of  pure  duration  with  its  degrees  of  ten¬ 
sion  or  condensation  into  images,  tries  to  bridge  the  chasm  between  * 
mind  and  matter;  and  that  Bosanquet,  like  the  present  writer, 
recognizes  the  reality,  though  not  the  separate  or  independent  ex¬ 
istence  of  nonmental  being. 


198 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


singularist  view  is  the  all-inclusive  social  unity ,  an  all- 
inclusive  social  sovereignty,  to  which  all  other  social  group¬ 
ings  are  subservient.  The  democratic  or  pluralistic  con¬ 
ception,  however,  is  that  the  State  is  a  human  device  set 
up  to  enable  us  to  get  along.  The  State  is  an  instrument, 
a  tool.  e  are  not  its  tools,  it  is  our  tool.  Among  the 
great  Pluralists  are  Locke,  Berkeley,  Leibnitz,  William 
James,  and  Bergson. 

The  second  central  problem  of  modern  philosophy — the 
problem  of  the  nature  of  the  unity  of  the  universe  and  its 
relation  to  the  diversity  or  plurality  of  the  empirical 
world — takes  on  a  different  coloring  and  emphasis,  ac¬ 
cording  to  whether  the  world  is  looked  at  statically  or 
dynamically.  It  would  not  be  a  great  exaggeration  to  say 
that  modern  philosophy,  before  Fichte  and  Hegel,  was, 
with  the  exception  of  Leibnitz  and  eighteenth  century  evo¬ 
lutionists  in  France,  prevailingly  static  in  its  outlook.  The 
truly  real  world  was  not  looked  upon  as  having  a  history. 
Change,  growth,  evolution,  struggle,  and  effort  were  for¬ 
eign  to  the  true  reality,  which  was  an  eternal  order,  an 
unchanging  Substance  or  Substances.  In  the  nineteenth 
century,  philosophy  became  increasingly  dynamic,  his¬ 
torical,  or  evolutionary  in  its  outlook.  Thus,  whereas  be¬ 
fore  Kant  we  find  the  principal  stress  laid  on  some  sort 
of  changeless  elements,  such  as  extension,  primary  quali¬ 
ties,  thought,  ideas ,  truths  of  reason,  material  particles,  in 
recent  philosophy  the  concepts  and  problems  that  pre¬ 
dominate  are  those  of  force,  development,  will,  life,  indi¬ 
viduality,  evolution,  change,  and  time. 

Before  proceeding  to  the  consideration  of  the  chief  prob¬ 
lems  of  modern  philosophy,  in  the  general  order  of  their 
emergence,  it  may  be  well  to  outline  the  scope  of  philosophy 
to-day.  Man  and  his  physical  environment  are  the  two  ever 
abiding  terms  for  reflective  thinking,  however  much  hu¬ 
man  interpretations  of  these  terms  may  change.  Physical 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  REALITY 


199 


Nature ,  Human  Nature,  and  their  Interconnections — here 
we  have  stated  the  whole  vast,  intricate,  and  significant 
problem  of  philosophy.  Thus,  systematic  philosophy  or 
Metaphysics ,  as  I  would  employ  the  term,  falls,  logically, 
into  three  principal  divisions,  (1)  Philosophy  of  Nature  or 
Cosmology :  this  involves  the  consideration  of  the  constitu¬ 
tion  or  structure  of  matter  and  life,  the  place  of  life,  con¬ 
sciousness,  and  individuality  in  nature,  the  respective 
meanings  and  relations  of  mechanical  causality  and  pur¬ 
posiveness  or  teleology,  the  characters  and  place  of  space 
and  time.  (2)  Philosophy  of  Man,  or  of  Society  and  Values: 
this  involves  the  consideration  of  the  structure  or  consti¬ 
tution  of  personality  and  society,  the  place  of  self-hood 
and  society  in  the  evolutionary  order,  the  nature  of  knowl¬ 
edge  and  truth,  the  nature  of  the  other  values  which,  like 
truth,  are  functions  of  social  individuality  or  personality, 
namely  the  aesthetic  values,  the  ethical  values,  and  the 
interpersonal,  affectional  values,  and,  finally,  the  inter¬ 
relationships  of  all  the  principal  forms  of  values.  (3) 
Philosophy  of  the  Cosmos,  or  Metaphysics  of  Ultimate 
Reality :  this  consists  in  gathering  up  and  interweaving  the 
results  of  the  two  previous  parts ;  it  includes  such  prob¬ 
lems  as  the  ultimate  relations  of  Unity,  Plurality  and 
Individuality,  of  Continuity  and  Novelty,  of  Evolution  and 
Permanence,  of  Law,  Order  and  Freedom,  and,  finally,  of 
the  place  of  Personality  and  its  Values  in  the  Universe 
conceived  as  a  Totality. 

It  is  impossible  to  discuss  thoroughly  the  fundamental 
problems  in  any  main  division  of  philosophy  without,  at 
the  same  time,  taking  account  of  problems  in  other  divi¬ 
sions  of  the  subject.  Thus,  for  example,  the  problem  of 
the  relation  of  mind  and  body  in  man,  or  of  the  mental  and 
the  physical  in  the  universe  at  large,  cannot  be  considered 
thoroughly  without  entering  upon  the  problems  of  the 
general  structure  of  organisms  and  of  matter,  the  nature 


200 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


of  our  knowledge  both  of  mind  and  body,  and  the  nature 
of  volition  and  human  individuality.  It  is  impossible  to 
consider  the  problem  of  the  Unity  of  the  Universe,  without 
taking  into  account  the  natures  of  space,  causality,  pur¬ 
pose,  time,  evolution,  human  individuality.  Since,  in  phi¬ 
losophy,  one  big  problem  always  leads  us  into  others,  the 
justification  of  such  a  division  as  that  proposed  above  is 
that  it  affords  the  plan  for  an  orderly  conspectus  and 
treatment  of  the  whole  field.  The  following  treatment 
aims  only  at  a  discussion  of  the  central  problems  in  an 
elementary  fashion.  Therefore,  I  shall  not  spread  it  out 
rigidly  upon  the  lines  of  the  above  division.  I  shall  aim 
rather  to  discuss  the  central  problems  and  theories,  in  the 
order  of  their  emergence  into  prominence  in  the  history  of 
modern  thought,  and  with  regard  to  the  way  in  which  they 
lead  into  one  another.  The  attentive  reader  will  note  that, 
broadly,  the  treatment  does  correspond  to  the  order  out¬ 
lined  above.  This  order  corresponds,  roughly,  to  the  de¬ 
velopment  of  modern  philosophy.  The  great  seventeenth 
century  systems  on  the  continent  of  Europe  were  primarily 
cosmologies,  Locke  and  Hume  emphasized  psychological, 
ethical,  and  political  problems,  with  Kant  the  emphasis,  in 
continental  philosophy,  shifted  to  psychology,  theory  of 
knowledge  and  ethics.  Kant’s  successors,  Fichte  and  Hegel, 
attempted  psychological,  ethical  and  social  cosmologies. 
They  sought  to  read  the  meaning  of  the  universe  in  terms 
of  a  broadly  and  profoundly  conceived  philosophy  of 
human  nature. 

References 

Hoffding,  H.,  History  of  Modern  Philosophy. 

*  James,  William,  Some  Problems  of  Philosophy,  Chapters  II 
and  III. 

•Rand,  B.,  Modern  Classical  Philosophers  (judiciously  chosen 
selections  from  all  the  great  modern  philosophers). 
Windelband,  W.,  History  of  Philosophy. 


CHAPTER  XV 


DUALISM 

This  theory  assumes  that  there  are  two  distinct  sub¬ 
stances.  In  the  human  individual  they  interact.  This  is 
the  common  sense  view.  It  is  based  on  what  appear  to  be 
glaring  distinctions.  When  we  will,  a  mental  process,  we 
determine  a  bodily  movement.  In  tight  places  we  fre¬ 
quently  discover  that  we  can  do  things  with  our  bodies  that 
we  never  thought  we  could  do,  for  example,  in  situations 
of  fright,  and  in  athletic  contests,  et  cetera.  Conversely, 
bodily  conditions  influence  mental  processes. 

When,  however,  we  consider  the  respective  properties  of 
mind  and  body,  we  find  that  they  are  sharply  contrasted. 
While  body  is  a  divisible  mass,  extended  in  space,  mind  is 
an  indivisible  unity,  having  no  mass  or  extensity.  Again, 
body  seems  at  all  times  to  be  determined  from  without, 
while  mind  is  a  self-determining,  self-directing  principle. 
Mind  has  interests  and  seeks  to  realize  values.  It  is  pur¬ 
posive  and  develops  new  interests  and  values,  and  con¬ 
tinually  devises  new  means  to  realize  its  values.  The 
dualistic  theory  thus  seems  to  be  based  on  obvious  facts 
and  contrasts  in  respect  to  the  relation  of  mind  and  body. 
The  Cartesian  dualist  says  that  the  body  apart  from  mind 
is  mechanical,  a  system  of  juxtaposed  points  moving  in 
space.  The  living  organism  is  a  machine.  If  there  wTere 
in  it  no  mind,  it  would  still  exhibit  the  same  motions  which 
it  now  manifests.  Heat,  as  agitation  of  particles,  is  the 
cause  of  motions  of  the  heart.  Fine  particles  of  blood 

pass  to  the  brain.  Thus,  the  heart  gives  rise  to  fine  ethereal 

201 


202 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


flames  forming  the  “animal  spirits.”  The  nerves  are 
tubular  vessels  which  conduct  the  animal  spirits.  Animals 
are  pure  automata,  since  they  have  no  souls.  Except  for 
the  influence  of  thought,  men  are  likewise  automata.1  Such 
was  Descartes’  view. 

Thus,  extreme  Dualism  affirms  the  substantial  reality  of 
two  sharply  contrasted  kinds  of  being,  which  may  interact 
at  specific  points,  to  wit  in  human  organisms.  These  beings 
or  substances  or  entities  are — 


MATTER  OR  BODY ,  which 
is  Extended  in  space, 
Consists  of  juxtaposed 
parts, 

Hence  is  Divisible, 
Ponderable,  and 
Moves  through  the  impact, 
pressure,  and  pull  of  other 
bits  of  matter  or  by  virtue 
of  its  own  weight. 


MIND  OR  SPIRIT ,  which 
is  Unextended, 

A  Lenity  whose  various  as¬ 
pects  are 

Inseparable  features  of 
the 

One,  Indivisible, 
Imponderable,  and 
Self -active  pulsation  of 
Thinking  itself. 


1  See,  especially,  Descartes’  Principles,  IV,  and  the  sixth  Medi¬ 
tation.  The  brusque  opposition  of  Body  and  Soul,  in  the  Cartesian 
system  and  its  congeners  and  descendants,  is  motivated  by  the  con¬ 
flict  between  the  new  naturalistic  and  mechanistic  conception  of 
Nature  and  the  animistic  and  spiritualistic  view  of  Nature  which 
was  the  heritage  of  the  Christian  world  from  the  Middle  Ages. 
Descartes  accepts  and  develops  the  doctrine  that  the  human  body, 
like  all  other  animal  bodies,  is  a  machine,  and,  hence,  a  causally 
determined  part  of  the  world  machine.  On  this  hypothesis,  reality 
and  efficacy  can  be  saved  for  the  Soul,  Spirit,  or  Mind  of  man  only 
by  assuming  that  it  is  absolutely  different  in  character  from  the 
bodily  machine,  with  which  it  is  associated  and  which  it  influences. 
If  the  living  body  is  merely  a  machine,  then  either  the  mind  is  its 
by-product  or  is  an  absolutely  different  kind  of  entity  which  inter¬ 
acts  with  the  machine,  however  inconceivable  interaction  may  be. 
On  the  mechanistic  theory  of  life,  either  mind  is  an  epiplienomenon 
or  the  true  relation  is  Dualistic  Interactionism.  From  this  dilemma 
there  is  no  logical  escape.  The  doctrines  and  arguments  of  “psy¬ 
chical  researchers”  to-day,  who  accept  the  veridicality  of  telepathy, 
telekinesis,  levitation,  communications  from  the  souls  of  the  de¬ 
parted,  et  hoc  genus  omne,  are  usually  based  on  the  premises  of 
Dualism. 


DUALISM 


203 


It  is  necessary  to  distinguish  clearly  between  Naive  and 
Sophisticated  Dualism .  Common  sense  or  Naive  Dualism 
holds  that  body  or  matter  is  just  what  we  perceive  to  exist 
in  the  external  world,  by  the  means  of  our  senses.  Likewise 
Mind  is  just  what  we  are  conscious  of  being  when  we  feel 
and  think  and  will.  But  a  little  reflection  suffices  to  show 
that  what  we  perceive  depends  in  part:  (1)  On  the  mo¬ 
mentary  condition,  as  well  as  on  the  permanent  structure, 
of  our  sense  organs;  (2)  on  the  images  and  concepts  which 
embody  the  results  of  social  and  racial  experience,  handed 
down  to  us  through  tradition,  and  which  are  to  some  ex¬ 
tent  supplemented  by  the  previous  findings  of  our  indi¬ 
vidual  experience,  reflection,  and  memory;  and  (3)  on  the 
fact  that  our  perceptions  are  also  influenced  by  our  spatial 
positions  and  our  emotional  prejudices  and  desires.  Thus 
sophistication  begins,  and,  with  it,  the  process  of  drawing 
into  the  mind  or  subject  ivhat  naive  belief  puts  in  the 
object.  The  first  step  in  this  process  of  sophistication  is 
exemplified  in  ancient  Atomism  and  in  the  Dualism  of 
Descartes  and  Locke. 

I.  Cartesian  and  Lockeian  Dualism 

Descartes  and  Locke  are  in  substantial  agreement  as  to 
the  respective  natures  and  relations  of  bodies  and  minds. 
Bodies  are  made  up  of  minute  particles  of  space-occupying 
substance.  These  cannot  be  atoms,  says  Descartes,  for  any¬ 
thing  which  occupies  space  must  be  indefinitely  divisible. 
But  they  are  mass  particles.  These  differ  in  shape,  size, 
and  rate  and  figure  of  motion.  Magnitude,  extension,  fig¬ 
ure,  and  motion  are  clear  and  distinct  ideas  of  matter,  and, 
therefore,  true  (Descartes,  fifth  Meditation) .  Gross  bodies, 
perceived  through  our  senses,  consist  of  configurations  of 
mass  particles.  For  Descartes,  space  is  the  same  as  ma¬ 
terial  substance,  and  thought  is  the  same  as  mental  sub- 


204 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


stance.  Locke  holds  that  solidity  also  is  a  property  of 
bodies  in  themselves.  Thus,  for  him,  the  qualities  which 
mass  particles  (the  term  he  uses  is  “corpuscles”),  the  con¬ 
stituents  of  bodies,  possess  in  themselves  are  size,  shape, 
mass,  and  movement.  Because  of  the  grossness  of  our 
senses,  we  do  not  perceive  the  mass  particles,  but  there  is 
a  rough  correspondence  between  the  spatial  qualities  that 
we  perceive  in  bodies  and  the  primary  qualities  of  real 
bodies. 

Body  and  mind  interact  in  man.  As  to  the  how  of  in¬ 
teraction  Descartes  vacillates.  The  view  which  he  seems 
to  favor  most  is  that  the  animal  spirits,  a  purely  mechanical 
process  generated  in  the  heart,  is  carried  to  the  brain  and, 
in  the  pineal  gland,  influences  and  is  influenced  by  the 
mind ;  and  thus,  in  turn,  enables  the  mind  to  control 
physiological  movements.  Locke  simply  accepts  interac¬ 
tion  as  a  patent  though  an  inexplicable  fact.  He  says  that 
it  is  possible,  though  not  probable,  that  a  certain  system  of 
matter  might  think.  It  is  improbable,  since  thought  seems 
to  be  more  than  the  effect  of  the  mechanical  interaction  of 
particles  juxtaposed  in  space.  But,  on  the  whole,  he  be¬ 
lieves  in  two  different  substances  which  interact.  But  we 
do  not  know  the  natures  of  substances ;  we  assume  them  as 
‘  ‘  the  unknown  support  of  known  qualities.  ’  ’  Material  sub¬ 
stance  is  the  unknown  support  of  the  primary  qualities  of 
empirical  bodies ;  mental  substance  is  the  unknown  support 
of  thought  and  volition.  With  respect  to  matter,  Locke 
approaches  very  closely  to  the  position  of  Kant ;  the 
critical  difference  between  them  being  that  Kant  makes 
space  a  mental  form  of  perception,  whereas  Locke  makes  it 
a  physical  reality.  With  respect  to  the  ultimate  natures 
of  substances,  both  are  agnostics.  Both  say  that  while  we 
cannot  help  believing  in  substances,  we  do  not  know  what 
these  are  in  themselves.  We  have  genuine  empirical  knowl¬ 
edge  only  of  their  appearances  to  the  mind.  Locke  holds 


DUALISM 


205 


that  we  do  not  know  how  one  body  can  act  on  another  body 
any  better  than  we  know  how  mind  and  body  can  act  on 
one  another.  We  must  simply  accept  the  inexplicable  facts 
in  both  cases. 

II.  Kantian  or  Agnostic  Dualism 

Kant,  the  main  features  of  whose  philosophy  are  best 
considered  in  another  connection,  is  significant  here,  be¬ 
cause  his  dualism  is  a  halfway  house  on  the  road  to  Ideal¬ 
ism  or  Spiritualism.  Cartesianism  puts  the  secondary 
qualities  of  bodies,  such  as  sounds,  colors,  tastes,  and  odors, 
in  the  subject,  and  leaves  space  and  time  as  objectively  or 
physically  real  determination  of  bodies;  thus  laying  itself 
open  to  the  criticism,  as  we  shall  see,  of  inconsistency. 
Kant  puts  space  and  time  in  the  subject,  and  leaves  only 
an  unknown  something,  an  X,  as  the  objective  ground  of 
sensation.  Space  and  Time  are  in  the  mind;  the  mind  is 
not  in  space  and  time;  thus  we  escape  the  difficulty  of 
attempting  to  conceive  how  the  mind  can  act  on  or  be  acted 
upon  by  spatial  objects.  We  do  not  and  cannot  know  the 
nature  of  the  objective  ground  of  our  sense  experiences. 
But  we  do  know  that  the  whole  order  of  bodies,  as  these 
exist  for  common  sense  and  science,  is  phenomenal  reality, 
not  ultimate  reality.  The  difficulty  with  Kant’s  doctrine  is 
that  he  fails  to  explain  by  what  right,  on  his  premises,  we 
assume  at  all  that  experience  has  an  objective  ground.  In 
order  to  do  so,  we  must  apply  the  concept  of  causality  be¬ 
yond  the  limits  of  experience ;  that  is,  we  ask  for  a  cause 
of  our  sensations,  and,  according  to  Kant,  causality,  like 
our  other  mental  forms,  has  no  proper  application  beyond 
sense  experience. 

Berkeley,  the  Idealist,  is  more  logical  than  Kant  at  this 
point.  He  argues  that,  since  all  sense  qualities  depend  on 
a  mind,  and  since  I  cannot  explain  my  own  sense  percep- 


206 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


tions  as  created  by  my  own  mind,  while,  at  the  same  time, 
I  know  that  I  am  a  true  cause  of  changes  in  the  world, 
therefore  my  sense  perceptions  must  be  produced  in  my 
mind  by  the  activity  of  some  other  mind.  Thus  the  process, 
begun  in  Cartesianism,  of  taking  the  sense  qualities  into  the 
mind  or  subject,  ends  in  Berkeley  in  the  whole  world 
being  regarded  as  a  society  of  interacting  or  intercommu¬ 
nicating  subjects  or  selves. 

III.  Criticism  of  Dualism 

What  are  some  of  the  objections  to  this  theory?  First 
of  all,  it  is  inconceivable  and  inexplicable  how  an  unex¬ 
tended  principle  can  act  upon  an  extended  principle;  be¬ 
cause  of  this  it  is  said  that  the  relation  cannot  be  explained. 
To  this  objection,  however,  the  dualist  may  reply  that  many 
inconceivable  things  are  facts,  and  he  will  urge  that  it  is 
our  province  to  be  guided  by  facts  rather  than  by  consid¬ 
erations  of  inconceivability.  The  second  objection  to  dual¬ 
ism  is  this :  That  if  mind  acts  on  body,  then  the  principle 
of  the  *  ‘  conservation  of  energy  ’  ’  is  violated.  This  principle 
is  the  statement  that,  in  all  changes  or  transformations  of 
energy  in  the  physical  series,  there  is  a  mathematical 
equivalence.  So  much  energy  of  one  kind  produces  so 
much  energy  of  another  kind.  Throughout  the  series  there 
is  a  constancy,  there  is  a  strict  quantitative  equivalence, 
thus  precluding  either  the  creation  or  destruction  of  energy. 
Now,  in  the  interaction  of  the  dualist,  there  is  energy  in¬ 
jected  into  the  physical  series  by  the  action  of  the  mind 
on  the  body,  and  this  injection  means  the  destruction  of  the 
principle  of  the  conservation  of  energy. 

To  this  objection  the  dualist  may  reply :  The  amount 
of  energy  injected  into  the  physical  series  by  mind  is 
too  small  to  be  detected  by  our  most  refined  instruments. 
The  objector  Would  object  again  to  this  reply  by  saying, 


DUALISM 


207 


that,  though  such  a  position  is  plausible,  it  does  violate  the 
principle  of  the  conservation  of  energy.  A  still  further 
dualistic  reply  might  be  something  like  that  which  Lotze 
indicated,  namely,  the  passage  from  the  one  series  to  the 
other  is  on  the  whole  balanced,  and  there  is  thus  no  loss 
or  gain.  This  also  is  very  plausible,  but  it  entangles  the 
dualist  in  a  further  difficulty  and  one  of  such  a  character 
that,  if  the  dualist  adheres  to  it,  he  ceases  to  be  a  dualist. 
If  energy  can  thus  be  interchanged,  then  energy  is  the 
common  denominator  of  both  series,  and  mind  and  matter 
are  only  forms  of  a  common  principle.  The  dualist  has 
still  a  third  answer,  which  is  to  the  effect  that  the  mind 
directs  the  body  but  uses  no  energy  in  so  doing.  The 
advocate  of  this  view  might  point,  for  example,  to  an 
engineer  directing  a  great  engine  by  a  small  lever,  or,  to 
such  an  incident  as  President  Wilson  pressing  a  button 
at  Washington,  thus  setting  in  motion  all  the  machinery 
in  a  large  exhibit  on  the  Pacific  Coast.  But  the  President 
did  use  energy — he  pressed  the  button — so  this  answer  also 
is  invalid.  Still  a  fourth  reply  might  be  given  by  the 
dualist.  He  may  argue  that  the  principle  of  the  conserva¬ 
tion  of  energy  is  a  working  hypothesis  for  the  physicist, 
when  dealing  with  strains  and  tensions,  and  with  the 
mathematical  relations  of  mass  particles.  He  finds  that  the 
principle  works,  but  his  point  of  view,  says  the  dualist,  is 
abstract,  and  from  a  total  point  of  view  there  is  no  reason 
for  assuming  that  the  physical  series  is  a  closed  one.  The 
standpoint  of  physics  is  partial  or  abstract,  that  of  phi¬ 
losophy  total  or  concrete.  When  we  take  the  whole  of 
experience  into  account,  it  is  seen  to  be  too  complex  for 
one  to  be  justified  in  saying  that  the  principle  of  the 
conservation  of  energy  is  absolutely  valid. 

This  principle  when  considered  in  connection  with  the 
second  law  of  thermodynamics  (the  entropy  of  a  physical 
system  tends  to  increase)  breaks  down  as  an  ultimate 


208 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


principle  for  interpreting  experience.  In  actual  physical 
changes,  work  and  motion  are  effected  only  through  the 
loss  of  available  heat  energy.  In  the  doing  of  work, 
energy  is  passing  from  available  to  unavailable  forms, 
from  unequal  to  equal  temperatures.  Energy  generated 
by  a  waterfall  may  be  harnessed  and  made  to  drive  wheels 
or  other  types  of  machines.  But  a  large  proportion  of 
the  energy  of  the  waterfall  is  dissipated  in  the  form  of 
heat.  If  the  sum  total  of  energy  in  the  universe  is  con¬ 
stant,  and  if  the  doing  of  work  always  involves  the  pas¬ 
sage  of  energy  from  available  to  unavailable  forms,  then 
either  the  universe  is  finite  in  duration,  or  there  is  a  crea¬ 
tive  source  of  energy  which  compensates  for  the  passage 
of  available  into  unavailable  forms.  If  we  do  not  assume 
this,  then  we  must  assume  that  the  universe  is  running 
down,  that  is,  is  tending  to  equilibrium,  and  that  the  time 
is  coming  when  there  will  be  nothing  doing.  If  the  universe 
has  existed  through  infinite  time,  then  it  must  have  run 
down  long  ago.  Infinite  energy,  in  amount,  is  not  a  sum 
total;  it  is  not  a  so  much.  The  term  “infinite  sum”  has 
no  meaning ;  a  universe  consisting  of  a  definite  quantity 
of  energy,  however  great,  would  be  finite.  A  universe 
which  had  no  beginning  is  not  finite  and  it  can  have 
no  ending.  Thus  we  are  led  to  the  view  that  the  universe 
cannot  be  a  perpetual  motion  machine  containing  a  definite 
quantum  of  energy.  The  second  law  of  thermodynamics, 
when  thought  out,  requires  us  to  assume,  if  the  universe 
is  endless  in  duration,  a  Creative  Source  of  Energy. 

The  discussion  of  the  above  point  brings  us  directly 
to  another  problem,  namely,  what  do  we  mean  by  matter? 
Common  sense  dualism  holds  the  view  that  matter  is  what 
we  perceive.  When  the  dualist  believes  in  interaction,  he 
means  to  say  that  an  unextended  entity  is  seated  somewhere 
in  the  brain  and  directs  it.  Descartes  got  himself  into 
inextricable  difficulties  in  trying  to  square  the  theory  that 


DUALISM 


209 


the  human  body  is  a  pure  machine  with  the  recognition 
of  the  soul  or  mind  as  an  original  source  of  volition  and 
thinking.  The  scientific  conception  of  matter  is  not  identi¬ 
cal  with  the  common  sense  view,  and  the  difference  is  seen  in 
the  fact  that  the  man  in  the  street  is  a  naive  realist  as  re¬ 
gards  the  problem  of  our  knowledge  of  reality.  He  believes 
that  the  real,  external  world  is  just  what  we  perceive,  and 
exists,  just  as  we  perceive  it,  independently  of  our  per¬ 
ceptions.  The  idealist  points  out  that  what  we  perceive 
does  not  exist  independently  of  our  perceiving  it.  The 
world  of  experience  is,  he  shows,  a  world  of  sense  qualities. 
It  is  a  congeries  of  sense  qualities  having  temporal  and 
spatial  relations.  Now  sense  qualities  are  just  things  per¬ 
ceived  by  minds.  The  idealist  asks  this  question  of  the 
naive  realist.  If  sense  qualities,  which  are  all  that  you 
perceive,  are  independent  of  the  mind,  how  do  they  exist 
when  no  mind  perceives  them?  Is  there  color  when  no 
one  is  looking?  Is  there  sound  when  no  one  is  listening? 
Sometime  ago  I  read  a  book  entitled,  Light ,  Visible  and 
Invisible.  Such  a  title  is  really  tantamount  to  the  ex¬ 
pressions,  untasteable  taste,  unhearable  sound,  or  unseeable 
light.  This  is  nonsense.  If  the  naive  realist  says  that  he 
thinks  the  perceived  sense  qualities  are  independent  of 
mind,  what  is  the  nature  of  these  qualities  when  not  per¬ 
ceived  ?  If  I  were  to  bring  before  a  class  a  band  of  colors, 
without  a  doubt  the  girls  would  recognize  the  differences 
between  them  better  than  the  boys.  Were  there  a  number 
of  musical  instruments  played  here  now,  many  of  you 
would  recognize  distinctions  which  others  would  not  hear 
at  all.  We  do  not  all  agree  either  as  to  the  number  of 
sense  qualities  perceivable,  for  example,  in  the  case  of 
colors  or  music ;  nor  as  to  the  relations  of  space,  time, 
and  intensity  in  sense  qualities.  Sense  qualities  are  vari¬ 
able  functions  depending  on  variations  in  the  senses,  mental 
and  physical  habits,  interests,  et  cetera.  That  which  exists 


210 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


apart  from  our  perceiving  is  nothing  but  the  abstract 
possibility  of  further  perceiving.  Then  what  exists  in 
the  moment  of  perception  is  not  matter,  but  experience. 
The  physical  world  is  just  this  possibility  of  experience 
for  all.  It  is  social  possibility.  What  we  mean  by  the 
physical  world,  the  idealist  argues,  is  something  that  can 
be  perceived,  if  there  be  someone  to  perceive  it,  and  can 
be  perceived  by  all  percipients.  Now,  we  do  not  all  agree 
as  to  its  qualities  and  relations,  but  we  attempt  to  over¬ 
come  this  subjective  perceptive  standpoint  by  means  of 
quantitative  ratios  which  serve  as  tests  of  commonness  or 
social  perceptibility,  and  it  is  this  that  is  the  basis  of  our 
belief  in  the  external  world.  The  latter  is  the  realm  of 
common  or  social  percepts  and  perceivables. 

Now  the  question  arises  what  is  matter  in  itself,  or  as 
it  is  apart  from  perception  and  experience?  The  scien¬ 
tific  dualist,  who  believes  in  an  independent  matter,  says 
to  the  idealist,  you  must  admit  that  something  indepen¬ 
dently  real  is  the  cause  of  what  we  perceive.  To  perceive 
there  must  be  an  objective  cause  or  ground  of  our  percep¬ 
tion.  We  do  distinguish,  says  the  dualist,  between  percep¬ 
tions  and  images,  between  realities  and  illusions. 

Were  I  to  say  to  this  class,  look  at  that  striped  tiger 
in  the  back  of  this  room,  you  would  immediately  think 
I  am  experiencing  illusions.  The  victim  of  delirium  tre¬ 
mens  sees  snakes  crawling  about  him,  but  we  can  neither 
see  them  nor  touch  them.  We  do  not  have  the  same  images 
and  perceptions  that  he  has.  His  visual  images  are  inco¬ 
herent  with  tactual  percepts  and  with  all  our  percepts. 
Thus  we  sav  he  is  in  an  abnormal  condition,  whereas  we 
are  normal.  Illusion  is  thus  a  test  of  the  distinction 
between  appearance  and  reality.  We  say  that  that  which 
resists  our  wills,  our  purposes  and  intents,  is  reality,  but 
objects  which  do  not  resist  or  modify  our  wills,  we  say 
are  illusions.  We  say  that  the  thing  which  we  cannot 


DUALISM 


211 


resist  is  real.  The  meaning  of  this  is  that  we  call  that 
real  wherein  the  qualities  of  our  sense  organs  are  con¬ 
firmed  by  the  experiences  of  the  other  senses  and,  more 
especially,  by  the  experiences  of  other  selves. 

The  scientific  dualist,  who  differs  radically  from  the 
scientific  materialist,  says  that  what  really  exists  inde¬ 
pendent  of  percipient  minds  is  a  world  of  mass  particles 
having  no  secondary  qualities.  He  conceives  a  world  of 
no  color,  no  taste,  no  smell,  no  temperature,  no  sound. 
It  is  this  world  that  really  and  independently  exists.  It 
is  a  world  of  mass  particles  moving  in  space  and  time. 
But,  impressed  by  the  fact  that  mind  or  thought  and 
volition  do  seem  to  be  real  causal  factors  at  some  points 
in  the  physical  process,  and  unable  to  conceive,  either  how 
mind  can  be  produced,  by  the  motion  of  mass  particles, 
or  how  mind  and  body  can  interact,  the  scientific  dualist 
is  content  to  affirm  the  facts,  and  to  admit  that  he  does 
not  understand  the  how  or  particular  go  of  the  interaction. 
He  is  unwilling  to  let  the  passion  for  intellectual  unification 
ride  roughshod  over  facts  and  obliterate  what  seem  to  him 
fundamental  distinctions  and  relations. 

References 

*  Avey,  A.  E.,  Readings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  XV. 

*  Descartes,  Meditations. 

*  Locke,  Essay  Concerning  Human  Understanding.  Especially 

Books  II  and  IV. 

McDougall,  TV,  Body  and  Mind. 

*  Russell,  B.,  The  Problems  of  Philosophy ,  Chapter  II. 


CHAPTER  XVI 


MATERIALISM 

I.  The  Scientific  Notion  of  Material  Substance 

The  scientific  dualist,  naive  dualist,  materialist,  and 
idealist,  all  agree  with  the  man  in  the  street  in  that  they 
unanimously  admit  the  existence  of  the  external  world. 
When  we  perceive,  they  assert,  there  is  something  out¬ 
side  our  own  minds.  A  disagreement  emerges,  however, 
as  to  what  this  something  really  is  and,  consequently,  as 
to  how  that  external  something  is  known,  how  it  acts  upon, 
and  is  acted  upon  by  the  human  mind. 

The  lecture  desk  before  me  is  as  I  perceive  it,  urges  the 
man  in  the  street.  Its  existence  is  independent  of  me. 
We  know,  however,  that  the  desk  as  I  perceive  it  is  in 
some  fashion  a  function  of  many  variables,  to  wit:  sense 
organs,  nerve .  currents,  my  position,  my  interests,  my 
attention,  my  previous  experience  and  ideas.  An  African 
savage  could  not  perceive  this  desk  before  me  just  as 
I  perceive  it.  It  would  not  mean  “desk”  to  him.  What 
we  perceive  is  largely  determined  by  our  already  achieved 
mental  structure  and  outlook.  In  view  of  this,  what  is 
the  factor  that  is  independent  of  my  perceiving?  Many 
say  that  this  object  before  me  is  a  mere  appearance,  and 
that  the  real  substance  is  something  different  in  kind  from 
its  appearances.  The  scientific  dualist  maintains,  as 
against  the  materialist,  that  there  are  two  kinds  of  being, 
mind  and  matter.  The  materialist  says  that  there  is 

only  one  kind  of  being,  and  that  is  matter.  The  attitude 

212 


MATERIALISM 


213 


of  the  materialist  is  indicated  by  the  old  adage:  What 
is  mind?  Answer:  It  is  no  matter.  What  is  matter? 
Answer :  Never  mind. 

The  advocate  of  material  substance  admits  that  the 
qualities  which  we  perceive  in  the  external  world  are  in 
part  dependent  on  our  organism.  He  admits  that  colors 
and  other  secondary  qualities  are  phenomena.  They  are 
the  joint  resultants  of  external  substance  and  of  our 
percipient  organism.  What  then  is  the  nature  of  this 
independent  substance  or  matter  ?  In  many  of  the  older 
forms  of  the  substance  theory,  it  consists  of  mass  par¬ 
ticles  in  motion.  It  is  an  aggregate  of  minute  bodies 
having  mass,  density,  and  varying  in  size,  and  perhaps 
in  shape.  In  terms  of  the  distinction  between  primary 
and  secondary  qualities,  the  secondary  qualities  are  sub¬ 
jective,  they  exist  only  where  there  is  a  percipient  organ¬ 
ism  for  which  they  exist.  Body  in  itself  consists  of  these 
minute  particles  in  motion.  In  perceiving  primary  qual¬ 
ities,  we  have  a  copy  of  being  as  it  is.  Molecules  in 
motion  is  thus  the  make-up  of  matter.  Recently  this 
'  Lockian  notion  has  been  greatly  modified  and  we  now 
have  a  more  dynamic  conception.  In  place  of  mass  par¬ 
ticles  in  motion,  we  now  have  the  view  that  mass  particles 
are  but  nodal  points  of  energy.  Matter  therefore  is  the 
1  esult  of  the  action,  on  our  sense  organs,  of  centers  of 
electrical  charges.  In  the  highly  elastic,  frictionless,  im¬ 
ponderable  ether  are  centers  of  strain,  and  these  strain 
centers  are  the  electrons.  Our  sense  organs  and  brain  are 
themseh  es  constellations  of  electrons.  This  newer  theory 
makes  matter  to  consist  of  nonmatter  in  motion.  There  are, 
however,  many  difficulties  involved  in  this  notion  of  the 
enormously  strong  ether,  as  well  as  in  the  assumption  of 
an  independent  substance  different  in  kind  from  what 
we  perceive  and  yet  assumed  to  be  the  cause  of  what  we 
perceive. 


214 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


My  criticisms  of  this  theory  are  in  part  identical  with 
Berkeley’s.  The  first  difficulty  is  as  to  how  the  advocate 
of  an  independent  material  substance  is  justified  in  his 
conception  that,  while  secondary  qualities  have  no  cor¬ 
relates  in  matter  itself,  the  primary  qualities  do  represent 
properties  that  are  inherent  in  matter.  Locke  and  Des¬ 
cartes  are  in  agreement  on  this  point.  The  secondary 
qualities,  they  both  say,  are  produced  in  us  by  the  action 
of  particles  that  actually  possess  the  primary  qualities. 
This  is  an  assumption,  and  is  for  many  purposes  highly 
convenient.  But  this  assumption  is  not  thoroughly  logical. 
Why  not?  No  one  ever  perceived  primary  qualities  with¬ 
out  secondary  qualities,  neither  did  anyone  ever  perceive 
secondary  qualities  unaccompanied  by  primary  qualities. 
There  is  no  such  thing  as  one  set  of  these  qualities  with¬ 
out  the  other.  The  disjunction  seems  forced  upon  us  that 
either  all  the  qualities  are  in  the  percipient  organism  or 
all  are  in  the  object.1 

The  advocate  of  material  substance  says  that  primary 
qualities  are  in  the  object,  for  the  reason  that  they  do  not 
vary  as  do  the  secondary  qualities.  The  secondary  qual¬ 
ities  do  vary  and  therefore  are  in  me.  But  primary  qual¬ 
ities  are  perceived  by  us  just  as  are  the  secondary,  and 
the  primary  qualities  do  vary,  although  less  markedly  than 
the  secondary.  Either  none  of  these  qualities  testify  to 
independent  substance  or  all  of  them  do.  The  Lockian 
distinction  is  illogical.  The  advocate  of  material  sub¬ 
stance  is  not  yet  silenced.  He  will  say,  “I  admit  that, 


i  Practical  and  social  motives  are  responsible  for  the  distinction 
between  primary  and  secondary  qualities.  The  so-called  primary 
qualities  of  bodies — space  occupancy,  mass,  inertia,  motion — are  the 
perceptible  qualities  which,  being  relatively  least  variable,  human 
beings  can  agree  upon  as  being ,  for  practical  and  social  purposes, 
constant.  Moreover,  since  vision  and  touch  are  the  two  senses 
through  which  our  active  intercourse  with  the  world  is  chiefly 
guided,  the  visual  and  tactual  qualities  which  have  most  constancy 
are  convenient  substrates  for  all  the  other  qualities. 


MATERIALISM 


215 


but  there  must  be  something  external  which  exists,  some 
cause  independent  of  our  will  and  imagination.  What 
is  it?”  The  advocate  of  an  independent  substance  insists 
I  that  there  is  something  independent  of  the  mind. 

Let  us  look  at  the  most  serious  difficulty  involved  in 
this  assumption  of  a  material  substance.  Naively,  we  all 
assume  and  believe  in  an  independent  substance.  We  be¬ 
lieve  in  it  until  we  reflect  a  moment  on  the  difficulties 
that  are  involved.  But  most  of  us  after  reflecting,  forth¬ 
with  go  back  on  our  reflection  and  still  believe  in  an  inde¬ 
pendent  material  substance.  We  are  like  the  man  spoken 
i  of  by  St.  J ames  in  the  Bible :  ‘  ‘  He  is  like  unto  a  man 

beholding  his  natural  face  in  a  glass:  for  he  beholdeth 
himself,  and  goeth  his  way,  and  straightway  forgetteth 
what  manner  of  man  he  was.”  We  assume  that  the  world 
as  v  e  perceive  it,  is  a  part  of  an  independent  reality. 
But  the  \  ariability  of  our  perceptions  ceaselessly  operates 
against  this  assumption.  Two  men  in  the  same  field  do  not 
see  identically  the  same  field.  Two  men  before  a  great 
mountain  do  not  perceive  identically  the  same  mountain. 

We  are  told  that  what  really  exists  is  a  material  sub¬ 
stance,  but  on  analysis  this  material  substance  is  not  the 
common  world  of  our  experience ;  it  is  a  substitute  for  it. 
It  is  something  which  by  hypothesis  can  never  be  directly 
experienced.  What  then  is  the  relation  of  this  world  of 
supposed  substance  to  our  common  world?  Here  we  get 
no  cogent  answer.  John  Locke  says  that  our  knowledge  is  a 
sort  of  poor  copy  of  the  external  world.  The  huge  assump¬ 
tion  made  here  Locke  never  was  fully  conscious  of.  How 
rdo  I  know  that  my  knowledge  is  a  copy?  A  copy  is  a 
copy  of  an  original.  How  do  we  know  that  our  knowledge 
is  a  copy?  If,  by  hypothesis,  we  never  could  know  the 
independent  material  substance,  then  how  could  we  ever 
tell  that  our  knowledge  is  a  copy  of  the  material  sub¬ 
stance  ?  This  is  the  greatest  difficulty  with  this  standpoint. 


216 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


By  what  transcendental  sense  could  these  men  perceive 
the  original? 

Two  further  difficulties  remain:  (1)  How  can  mass 
particles,  or  mass  points,  produce  in  us  the  sensations  of 
color,  sound,  touch,  taste,  smell,  heat?  This  difficulty  is, 
perhaps,  no  more  serious  than  the  converse  one  as  to 
how  the  mind  can  influence  physical  things.  (2)  The 
substrate  or  real  external  cause  of  visual  sensation  is 
wave  motion  in  the  ether,  we  are  told;  of  sound,  undula¬ 
tions  of  air  particles ;  of  touch,  mechanical  contact ;  of 
taste  and  smell,  chemical  changes ;  of  heat,  the  rapid  agi¬ 
tation  of  molecules.  If,  then,  there  be  one  real  physical 
substrate,  or  substance,  it  must  be  the  common  ground 
of  all  these  changes,  which  are  specific  causes  of  specific 
sensations.  We  have  ethereal  theories  of  the  physical 
substrate  of  color,  electricity,  and  magnetism ;  but  none 
that  are  plausible  as  a  physical  basis  for  smells,  tastes, 
and  sounds.  We  have  electronic  theories  of  electricity 
and  radioactivity,  and  an  attempt  at  electronic  theories 
of  gravitation  and  inertia ;  but  no  well-worked  out  theory 
which  makes  it  clear  how  all  kinds  of  physical  stimuli 
can  be  regarded  as  modifications  of  one  substrate  or  sub¬ 
stance.  The  reduction  of  the  various  types  of  quality  in 
nature,  as  we  perceive  nature,  to  one  consistent  type  of 
spatial  thing -in-motion,  is  far  from  having  been  attained. 
Perhaps,  it  is  better  to  admit  that  nature  is  not  so  simple 
and  homogeneous  as  the  doctrine  of  one  and  only  one 
kind  of  ultimate  material  substance  would  imply ;  that 
nature  has  several  qualitatively  different  kinds  of  thing, 
and  that  mind  is  a  true  and  organic  constituent  of  nature 
seems  a  reasonable  conclusion. 

Locke  admits  that  we  know  nothing  as  to  how  the  primary 
qualities,  such  as  figure,  size,  or  motion  of  parts,  produce  in  us 
secondary  qualities,  such  as  a  yellow  color,  a  sweet  taste,  a  sharp 
sound;  further,  that  we  do  not  know  whether  any  mere  material 


MATERIALISM 


217 


substance  exists,  or  how  it  can  interact  with  an  immaterial  sub¬ 
stance.  He  thinks  we  do  know  that  our  simple  ideas  agree  with 
things,  since  these  ideas  arise  in  us  independently  of  our  minds. 
But  Locke  admits  that  all  that  “this  sensitive  knowledge  of  par¬ 
ticular  existence”  amounts  to  is  that  there  is  something  corre¬ 
sponding  to  the  idea ;  for  example,  something  which  produces  in 
us  the  perception  of  a  fire.  ( Cf .  Locke,  Essay,  Book  IV.) 

The  “somethings”  or  “objects  themselves”  are  but  powers  to 
produce  various  sensations  in  us  by  their  primary  qualities.  This 
is  done  “by  single  imperceptible  solid  bodies  coming  from  objects 
to  the  ideas.”  Our  ideas  of  primary  qualities  resemble  the  objects; 
our  ideas  of  secondary  qualities  do  not. 

Hume  reduces  our  knowledge  of  the  external  world  to  the 
confidence  engendered  by  habit,  in  the  routine  succession  and 
repetition  of  impressions  seemingly  similar  and  contiguous,  but¬ 
tressed  by  the  mind’s  inveterate  propensity  to  feign  connections 
and  existences.  (Cf.  Hume,  Treatise  of  Human  Nature,  Bk.  I, 
Pts.  3  and  4). 

The  Matter  about  which  physicists  theorize  is  a  hypo¬ 
thetical  something,  a  construction,  a  theory.  Descartes  saw 
clearly  this  difficulty,  but  he  never  succeeded  in  making 
much  out  of  it.  He  was  doubtful  as  to  whether  there  is 
any  external  world  at  all.  He  says  that  it  is  possible  that 
all  of  our  perceptions  are  illusions.  To  guarantee  the 
validity  of  our  perceptions,  he  called  in  the  veracity  of 
God.  If  God  exists,  He  is  veracious — He  won’t  deceive 
us  and  therefore  there  must  be  an  external  world. 

i 

II.  Materialism 

The  scientific  dualist,  who  assumes  the  existence  of  a 
matter  different  from  the  experienced  world,  has  thus  far 
not  given  us  a  clear  and  consistent  conception  as  to  what 

I  this  matter  is,  nor  can  he  give  a  plausible  explanation  of 
bow  it  acts  on  mind  and  is  acted  on  by  mind.  In  actual 
experience  we  have  sense  qualities  and  mind  interdepen¬ 
dent.  Materialism  holds  that  matter  only  really  exists  and 


218 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


that  mind  is  but  an  epiphenomenon,  a  by-product  of  matter. 
Like  a  tramp  “bumming”  his  way  on  a  train,  it  is  not 
a  real  factor  in  the  process  of  experience.  The  materialist 
argues  that  matter  is  the  only  reality.  The  causes  of  all 
the  complex  qualities  of  experience,  both  in  the  physical 
and  the  mental  realms,  of  all  thought,  feeling  and  volition 
as  well  as  of  all  physical  and  vital  processes,  are  complex 
and  microscopic  movements  of  mass  particles  in  space. 
This  view  is  expressed  by  the  saying  that  brain  secretes 
thought  as  liver  does  bile  and  the  expression  “der  Mensch 
ist  was  er  isst  ’  ’ ;  “  man  is  what  he  eats.  ’  ’ 

The  arguments  given  by  the  materialist  are  these : 

1.  He  adduces  obvious  evidences  of  the  dependence  of 
consciousness  on  physical  condition  such  as :  If  the  supply 
of  blood  to  the  brain  stops,  unconsciousness  ensues ;  when 
in  great  fatigue,  it  is  difficult  to  think;  a  blow  on  the 
head  will  produce  unconsciousness ;  drugs  and  diseases 
have  various  effects  in  the  way  of  heightening  and  lower¬ 
ing  consciousness ;  mental  disorders  follow  on  lesions  of 
the  brain ;  old  age  comes  from  a  running  down  of  the 
bodily  machine,  and  this  is  accompanied  by  a  decline  in 
mental  power.  Finally,  the  cessation  of  bodily  functions 
results  in  the  extinction  of  thought. 

2.  The  materialist  reenforces  his  first  argument  by  point¬ 
ing  to  the  development  of  consciousness  in  the  biologi¬ 
cal  series.  He  regards  consciousness  as  a  function  which 
is  dependent  on  the  degree  of  development  of  the  nervous 
system.  There  seems  to  be  a  one-one  correspondence  or 
co-relation  between  the  vividness  and  apparent  efficiency 
of  consciousness  and  the  organization  or  complexity  of 
the  nervous  system.  Man  has  the  most  complicated  brain 
of  all  animals.  The  more  organized  the  nervous  system, 
the  more  organization  of  brain  structure,  the  higher  the 
degree  of  consciousness  and  intelligence.  Mind,  therefore, 
is  simply  a  function  of  the  nervous  system,  says  the  mate- 


MATERIALISM 


219 


rialist.  Consciousness  is  not  an  entity  or  an  agent,  it  is 
only  an  attribute  of  the  nervous  system. 

Let  us  examine  these  arguments.  Both  imply  that  con¬ 
sciousness  is  the  effect  of  purely  physical  causes.  What  do 
we  mean  by  saying  that  one  set  of  conditions  is  cause  of 
another  set?  In  the  sciences,  by  cause  is  meant  an  in¬ 
variable  and  unconditional  sequence ;  what  always  follows 
is  the  effect  and  what  always  precedes  is  the  cause.  This 
is  the  scientific  notion  of  cause,  save  where  the  more  rigid 
notion  of  quantitative  equivalence  is  used.  In  so  far  as 
cause  is  identified  with  the  idea  of  quantitative  equivalence, 
the  causal  idea  loses  its  significance  in  application  to  the 
relation  of  brain  and  consciousness.  Materialism  would 
be  established  scientifically,  if  the  processes  of  mind,  such 
as  perceiving,  imagining,  analyzing,  synthesizing,  general¬ 
izing,  forming  universal,  selecting,  inventing,  feeling,  valu¬ 
ing,  and  willing,  could  be  measured  and  equated,  in  terms 
of  energy  units,  with  other  forms  of  energy.  This  cannot 
be  done.  Mind  is  in  active  power,  and  yet  it  cannot  be 
identified  as  one  form  of  physical  energy.  If  it  be  an 
energy  system,  it  is  a  wholly  unique  kind  of  energy.  In 
measuring  the  equivalence  of  forms  of  physical  energy,  the 
ph}  sicist  can  find  no  place  into  which  mind,  the  measurer 
and  director,  will  fit.  From  the  standpoint  of  mechanics, 
mind  seems  to  be  a  troublesome  interloper  in  the  physical 
series.  It  w  ill  not  submit  to  be  f ormulized  in  terms  of 
foot-pounds,  ergs,  or  dynes.  Futhermore,  from  the  view¬ 
point  that  cause  is  invariable  sequence,  the  materialist’s 
argument  is  one-sided.  It  is  true  we  do  observe  mind 
changes  following  upon  bodily  processes,  but  the  converse 
is  equally  true,  and  it  is  on  this  converse  that  the  strength 
of  dualism  and  interaction  reposes.  In  his  first  argu¬ 
ment  the  materialist  ignores  one  side  altogether.  His  sec¬ 
ond  argument  is  much  more  important.  There  is  a 
correlation  between  the  degree  of  the  organization  of 


220 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


the  nervous  system  and  the  degree  of  consciousness  and 
intelligence.  We  cannot,  with  our  present  technic,  carry 
this  out  in  a  detailed  way,  but  we  must  admit  that  the 
functioning  of  mind  in  this  two-sided  world  of  ours  is 
dependent  on  a  nervous  system.  Minds  do  not  work  with¬ 
out  nervous  systems,  but  we  must  not  forget  that,  though 
the  nervous  system  may  be  a  causal  condition,  it  need  not 
be  the  total  explanation  of  the  operation  of  mind.  The 
functioning  of  the  nervous  system  may  be  an  invariable 
condition  of  the  function  of  consciousness  in  the  present 
empirical  environment,  but  we  cannot  explain  mind  en¬ 
tirely  in  terms  of  this  one  causal  condition. 

On  the  materialist’s  hypothesis,  mind  is  useless,  it  does 
not  really  do  anything,  it  is  an  otiose  by-product,  it  is 
wholly  passive.  In  the  organism,  bile  does  something 
physiologically,  and  we  can  analyze  it.  But  thought  es¬ 
capes  all  analysis  by  physical  means.  The  analogy  between 
thought  and  glandular  secretions  is  worthless  and  mis¬ 
leading. 

The  power  of  the  mind  to  influence  the  body  is  just 
as  well  attested  a  fact  as  the  converse.  All  our  purpose¬ 
ful  activities  depend  for  their  efficacy  on  this  power.  In 
critical  situations,  under  the  influence  of  strong  emotion, 
conviction,  faith,  fear,  pity,  loyalty  to  duty,  friends  or 
country,  the  mind  makes  the  body  do  unexpected  and 
otherwise  impossible  things.  The  influence  of  faith,  auto¬ 
suggestion,  heterosuggestion,  and  hypnotism,  which  is  just 
an  extreme  instance  of  suggestion,  in  increasing  and  direct¬ 
ing  the  bodily  energies,  in  producing  anaesthesia  and  actual 
bodily  changes,  and  in  healing  effects,  are  cases  in  point 
here.  That  the  set  or  attitude  of  mind,  however  generated, 
has  a  decided  influence  on  the  bodily  condition  and  action 
cannot  be  gainsaid  by  an  open-minded  person. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  animals  with  the  greatest  degree  of 
consciousness  are  those  which  dominate  creation.  “Beware 


MATERIALISM 


091 

Li*-*  L 

when  a  thinker  is  let  loose  on  this  planet,”  said  Emerson. 
Pictures,  poems,  tools,  states,  religion — these  are  the  pro¬ 
ducts  of  thought.  It  is  not  in  accordance  with  plain  facts 
to  say  that  conscious  intelligence  does  not  do  anything. 
Consciousness  is  efficacious  both  for  good  and  for  evil.  In 
the  recent  World  War,  we  have  seen  clearly  this  bifocal 
type  of  mental  efficacy. 

The  scientific-minded  materialist  appeals  to  the  doctrine 
of  the  conservation  of  energy  as  his  last  resort,  and  he 
assumes  that  this  supports  his  theory.  As  we  have  stated 
above,  this  is  only  a  working  hypothesis  and  we  do  not 
take  this  as  our  sole  guiding  principle.  But  even  if  we 
do  take  the  materialistic  viewpoint,  we  yet  have  something 
outside  the  range  of  measurement.  If  we  take  the  principle 
of  the  conservation  of  physical  energy  as  the  absolute  truth, 
we  can  see  no  reason  why  there  should  be  such  a  thing  as 
mind  appearing  in  the  series  of  organic  forms.  Either 
mind  is  an  efficient  agent,  and  in  that  case  the  conservation 
of  energy  is  not  an  absolute  principle,  or  mind  is  with¬ 
out  any  efficacy  and  in  that  case  the  mass  particles  moving 
in  space  do  not  seem  to  behave  in  accordance  with  nature’s 
principle  of  parsimony,  since  they  generate  a  superfluous 
and  useless  illusion,  that  is,  conscious  intelligence. 

On  reflection  it  is  clear  that  the  materialist  is  unable 
to  explain  how  mind  can  be  a  product  of  matter.  Further¬ 
more,  it  will  be  evident  that  the  scientific  conception  of 
matter  is  itself  a  product  of  mind.  The  matter  the  scien¬ 
tist  deals  with  is  a  conceptual  construction,  a  product 
of  the  scientific  imagination  and  not  anything  that  any¬ 
one  can  ever  experience.  But  how  remote  is  this  concep¬ 
tion  from  that  of  the  ordinary  man?  The  ordinary  man 
means  by  matter  the  organized  qualities  that  we  perceive. 
These,  we  have  seen,  in  part  depend  upon  our  perceiving. 
What  we  experience  are  grouped  sense  qualities.  Our 
world  of  experience  is,  therefore,  a  realm  in  which  the 


222 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


percipient  organism  and  the  object  mutually  imply  one 
another,  and  the  world  beyond  wdiat  we  perceive  is  only 
the  real  possibility  of  further  experience. 

In  short,  matter,  in  the  scientific  sense,  is  a  moving  con¬ 
figuration  of  mass  particles  in  space ;  or,  in  terms  of  the 
latest  theory,  a  system  of  electrically  charged  positions 
in  space.  It  has  none  of  the  qualities  which  we  perceive 
in  the  actual  physical  world,  the  realm  of  sense  experience. 
It  has  not  the  colors,  shapes,  sizes,  motions,  sounds,  odors, 
tastes,  feels,  and  warmth  and  cold,  which  we  attribute  to 
physical  objects.  It  is  devoid  of  all  “secondary ”  qualities 
and  all  “primary”  qualities  too,  except,  in  exceedingly 
comminuted  form,  position,  inertia,  attraction,  and  rela¬ 
tion  in  space.  Even  more  strikingly  is  it  devoid  of  the 
“tertiary”  or  aesthetic  qualities  of  beauty,  grandeur,  pic¬ 
turesqueness,  sublimity,  majesty,  or  homely  friendliness. 
Scientifically  conceived  matter  is  not  the  naiure  or  physical 
world,  which  man,  through  his  whole  being,  acts  on,  is 
acted  on  by,  struggles  and  communes  with,  in  part  knows 
and  masters  and,  in  part,  is  mastered  by.  It  is  incon¬ 
ceivable  that  such  a  ghostly  fabric,  woven  by  the  mathe¬ 
matical  imagination  however  deftly,  and  however  useful 
it  be  as  a  web  on  which  to  stretch  physical  calculations, 
should  be  the  ultimate  and  sole  reality  of  which  mind  is 
but  the  shadow  occasionally  thrown  hither  and  yon  on  the 
evershifting  web — Mind,  with  its  power  to  select,  general¬ 
ize,  abstract,  remember,  invent,  devise,  imagine,  purpose , 
and  execute,  with  its  power  to  remake  its  physical  environ¬ 
ment,  to  build  up  a  new  environment  of  social  institutions 
and  values,  and  to  create  a  spiritual  world  of  justice, 
integrity,  love,  beauty,  and  fellowship.  To' say  that  mind 
is  the  by-product  of  mass  particles  is  to  assume  that  the 
whole  superphysical  realm  of  human  and  cultural  life  and 
values,  including  the  “Nature”  of  our  common  human  ex¬ 
perience,  is  the  blindly  produced,  inexplicable,  and  super- 


MATERIALISM 


223 


fluous  effect  of  impacts  and  tensions  in  a  realm  of  ghostly 
entities  which  is  itself  the  offspring  of  the  constructive 
imagination  of  the  physicist.  Surely  this  is  making  the 
cart  draw  the  horse  with  a  vengeance. 

References  on  the  Conception  of  Matter 

*  Ames,  J.  S.,  The  Constitution  of  Matter. 

*  Avey,  A.  E.,  Headings  in  Philosophy ,  Chapter  XVI. 

Fournier  d’Albe,  The  Electron  Theory. 

Leighton,  J.  A.,  Man  and  the  Cosmos,  Chapters  XV,  XVI, 
XVIII-XXI  and  XXVII. 

*  Lodge,  Oliver,  Electrons. 

*  More,  L.  T.,  The  Limitations  of  Science. 

*  Nichols,  E.  F.,  “Physics”  ( Lectures  on  Science,  Philosophy 

and  Art),  Columbia  Univ.  Press. 

*  Pearson,  Karl,  Grammar  of  Science,  3d  edition,  Chapters 

VII-X. 

Poincare,  H.,  Science  and  Hypothesis. 

Poincare,  L.,  The  Evolution  of  Modern  Physics. 

*  Russell,  B.,  Our  Knowledge  of  the  External  World,  Lectures 

III  and  IV. 

*  Soddy,  F.,  Matter  and  Energy. 

*  Ward,  J.,  Naturalism  and  Agnosticism,  Volume  I,  Part  I, 

especially  Lectures  V  and  VI. 

References  on  Materialism 
Buchner,  L.,  Force  and  Matter. 

*  Calkins,  M.  W.,  The  Persistent  Problems  of  Philosophy,  Chap¬ 

ter  III. 

Haeckel,  E.,  The  Piddle  of  the  Universe. 

Lange,  F.  A.,  History  of  Materialism. 

*  Paulsen,  F.,  Introduction  to  Philosophy,  pp.  60-86. 

*  Robertson,  G.  Croom,  Hobbes. 

*  Selections  from  Hobbes,  by  Calkins,  in  Open  Court  Series. 

*  Seth,  James,  English  Philosophers,  Chapter  II. 

*  Taylor,  A.  E.,  Hobbes. 


CHAPTER  XVII 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  KANT 

The  philosophy  of  Kant  is  an  exceedingly  difficult  one 
to  outline  in  short  space.  Nevertheless,  it  has  proven  so 
provocative  of  further  speculation,  and  is  still  so  stimulat¬ 
ing,  that  its  main  ideas  should  be  considered  by  everyone 
interested  in  philosophy.  Indeed,  it  is  not  possible  to 
understand  fully  the  later  developments  in  philosophy 
without  reference  to  Kant.  In  this  chapter  I  shall  essay 
an  outline  of  Kant’s  most  significant  theories  in  the  hope 
of  thereby  sending  the  reader  to  Kant ’s  own  works,1  and  to 
more  extensive  discussions  thereon. 

Kant’s  philosophy  defies  classification.  In  his  theory  of 
knowledge  he  is  a  rationalist,  and  a  priorist,  and  yet  he 
holds  that  possible  experience  sets  the  bounds  of  knowledge. 
He  rejects  the  subjective  idealism  of  Berkeley,  and  he  pre¬ 
pares  the  ground  for  and  sows  the  seeds  of  objective 
idealism.  He  is  an  agnostic,  with  reference  to  a  scientific, 
demonstrable  knowledge  of  the  existence  of  God,  freedom, 
and  immortality,  but  he  justifies  a  rational  faith  in  these 
three  supreme  interests  of  man.  He  holds  that  man  is 
absolutely  limited  to  a  knowledge  of  phenomena  or  appear- 
>/  ances,  and  yet  he  maintains  that  man  unavoidably  and 
justifiably  assumes  the  reality  of  a  noumenal  or  spiritual 
order.  For  Kant,  man  and  all  his  deeds  are,  empirically , 

1  The  best  book  for  a  beginner  in  the  study  of  Kant  is  Watson’s 
Selections  from  Kant.  All  quotations  from  Kant  in  this  chapter 
are  from  that  book.  For  further  references  see  the  end  of  this 
chapter. 


224 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  KANT 


225 


mere  links  in  the  iron  web  of  physical  necessity,  whereas, 
morally  regarded ,  man  is  a  free  self-determining  rational 
spirit.  We  cannot  knoiv  God  or  the  true  self,  but,  in 
the  light  of  our  consciousness  of  our  infinite  moral  voca¬ 
tions,  we  must  believe  that  God  exists  as  the  Righteous  Gov¬ 
ernor  of  the  Universe  and  that  the  true  self  is  immortal. 

From  the  loins  of  Kant’s  philosophy  sprang  directly  the 
moral  idealism  of  Fichte,  indirectly  the  logical  idealism 
of  Hegel,  the  voluntarism  of  Schopenhauer,  the  agnostic 
phenomenalism  of  Hamilton  and  Spencer.  Through  the 
study  of  Kant  the  spirit  of  speculative  philosophy  has  been 
quickened  once  more,  after  an  epoch  of  positivism,  skepti¬ 
cism,  and  materialism,  in  Germany,  France,  England,  and 
America.  To  Kant  the  idealism  of  Green,  the  Cairds, 
Bradley,  Bosanquet,  and  Royce  owes  much.  Even  pragma¬ 
tism  may  be  regarded  as,  in  part,  an  effect  of  the  Kantian 
philosophy.  The  sensationalistic  or  “  idea-istic”  phenom¬ 
enalism  of  Mach  and  Pearson  is  like  the  Kantian  theory 
of  knowledge,  with  the  activity  of  the  Ego  left  out.  The 
same  remark  would  hold  true,  with  some  qualification,  of 
William  James’  later  philosophy  of  pure  experience. 

Kant,  who  had  been  brought  up  in  the  rationalistic  and 
a  priori  philosophy  of  Wolff,  which  constructed,  by  a 
priori  definitions  and  deductions,  the  theory  of  everything 
under  the  sun  (for  example,  of  architecture),  and  who 
had  been  awakened  from  his  dogmatic  slumber  by  the 
skepticism  of  Hume,  finds  philosophy  or  metaphysics  to 
be  in  a  deadlock.  It  oscillates,  he  tells  us,  between  extreme 
dogmatism  and  complete  skepticism.  Dogmatism  assumes, 
offhand,  the  competency  of  the  abstract  reason  to  prove 
everything  by  a  rationalistic  procedure  and  deductive 
methods.  This  procedure  leads,  owing  to  the  constant 
breakdown  of  these  proofs  and  the  ensuing  conflict  of 
reason  with  itself,  to  complete  skepticism.  But  skepticism 
is  equally  one-sided,  since  there  is  undoubted  knowledge, 


99£ 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


that  is,  mathematics  and  physical  science.  In  order  that 
philosophy  may  set  out  upon  the  path  of  progress,  Kant 
proposes  what  he  calls  a  revolution,  namely  a  critical  in¬ 
quiry  into  the  presuppositions  or  foundation  of  knowledge 
as  contained  in  the  self.2  Before  we  can  determine  whether 
it  is  possible  to  have  a  knowledge  of  the  great  objects  of 
metaphysical  speculation — God,  freedom,  and  immortality 
— we  must  first  inquire — under  what  conditions  alone, 
scientific  knowledge  is  logically  possible.  And  we  must 
not  set  out  in  our  inquiry  from  complete  skepticism,  since 
skepticism  would  prevent  our  taking  a  single  step  forward 
and,  therefore,  is  self -contradictory. 

By  criticism,  then,  Kant  means  an  analytic  inquiry  into 
the  fundamental  conditions  of  knowledge. 

Now,  says  Kant,  in  pure  mathematics  and  physics  we 
have  not  only  knowledge,  but  knowledge  a  priori,  that  is, 
not  derived  from  sense  experience.  If  we  can  find  what 
are  the  rational  or  nonempirical  factors  of  knowledge,  and 
determine  in  what  situation  these  factors  are  operative 
in  the  production  of  valid  knowledge,  we  shall  have  solved 
the  critical  problem.  We  can  then  determine  absolutely 
the  conditions  of  the  knowable,  and  make  a  sharp  separa¬ 
tion  between  all  possible  objects  of  knowledge  and  the 
legitimate  objects  of  faith. 

In  his  Critique  of  Pure  Reason,  Kant’s  conclusion  is 
that  there  are  nonempirical  factors  in  science,  but  that 
these  factors  have  no  valid  sphere  of  application  beyond 
the  limits  of  possible  experience  or  sense  perception;  and, 
since  we  can  have  no  perception  of  God,  of  an  act  of  free¬ 
dom,  or  of  an  indivisible  self,  belief  in  the  latter  is  based 
on  faith.  On  the  other  hand,  he  concludes,  in  his  Meta- 


2  Locke,  to  a  great  extent,  anticipated  Kant  in  this  enterprise. 
And  Hume,  who  traces  descent  from  Locke  via  Berkeley,  seems  to 
have  given  Kant  the  immediate  stimulus  to  his  inquiry  into  the 
foundations  of  knowledge. 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  KANT 


227 


physics  of  Ethics,  that  the  implications  of  our  moral  con¬ 
sciousness  not  only  entitle  us,  but  require  us,  to  postulate 
or  assume  the  reality  of  God,  freedom,  and  immortality. 
We  will  now  consider,  summarily,  Kant’s  procedure  in 
these  regards. 

Kant  finds  that  there  are  always  two  factors  in  genuine 
knowledge — the  raw  materials,  which  are  sense  experiences, 
and  the  synthetic,  organizing,  or  ordering,  activity  of  the 
mind.  The  content ,  stuff ,  or  material  of  knowledge  is 
sensation.  But  sensation  is  in  itself  a  chaotic  manifold. 
It  is  devoid  of  form,  that  is,  of  arrangement  and  orderly 
sequence.  The  latter  are  supplied  by  the  mind.  The  mind 
has  a  native  or  inborn  structure,  which  functions  in  the 
forms  of  knowledge.  To  the  mind’s  sensibility ,  or  faculty 
of  receiving  sense  impressions,  belong  natively  the  forms 
of  space  and  tune.  Space  and  time  are  native  to  the  mind, 
since  we  cannot  conceive  how  the  recognition  of  outness, 
side-by-sideness,  or  succession,  would  arise  out  of  experi¬ 
ences  in  which  they  were  not  already  present.  Space  and 
time  cannot  be  obtained  by  generalization  from  particular 
sense  perceptions,  without  presupposing  them  to  be  already 
there.  Moreover,  in  arithmetic  we  have  universal  and  nec¬ 
essary  judgments  or  propositions,  which  involve  the  con¬ 
sciousness  of  time ;  and,  in  geometry,  we  have  similar 
judgments  which  imply  the  consciousness  of  space. 
Now,  from  sense  perception  alone,  we  can  never  arrive 
at  a  truly  universal  judgment;  a  judgment  based  on  per¬ 
ception  alone  can  only  take  the  form  “So  far  as  I 
have  observed”  or  “So  far  as  has  been  observed.”  The 
fact  that,  in  mathematics  and  mechanics,  we  arrive  de¬ 
ductively  at  whole  systems  of  necessary  and  universal 
propositions  can  only  be  accounted  for  by  supposing  that 
space  and  time  are  forms  of  perception  native  to  the  mind. 

To  the  understanding  or  the  faculty  of  making  judg¬ 
ments,  that  is,  of  forming  the  concepts  and  laws  that 


228 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


constitute  order  and  sequence,  belong  the  native  forms  of 
judgment — the  universal  ways  in  which  the  mind  syn¬ 
thesizes  or  orders  the  contents  of  sense  perception.  These 
i  forms  are  the  categories ,  that  is,  the  fundamental  and 
universal  forms  of  thinking  objects  and  their  relations. 
Through  the  use  of  these  categories ,  the  mind  builds  up  the 
material  of  sense  perception  into  a  systematized  or  orderly 
whole  of  intelligible  experience ;  that  is,  it  builds  up  science 
and,  in  so  doing,  builds  up  nature,  as  the  latter  exists  for 
common  sense  and  for  science. 

The  categories  3  of  Kant  correspond  to  the  classification 
of  judgment  forms  in  the  traditional  logic.  They  are  as 
follows : 

1.  Quantity 
Unity 
Plurality 
Totality 
3.  Relation 

Inherence  and  Subsist¬ 
ence,  or  Substance 
Causality  and  Depend¬ 
ence 

Community,  or  Reci¬ 
procity  of  Causal  In¬ 
fluence 

In  order  to  illustrate  Kant’s  argument  and  theory  it  will 
suffice  to  show  the  application  of  a  few  of  the  categories: 
(1)  Unity.  The  mind  unites  various  sensations,  for  exam¬ 
ple,  color,  form,  weight,  size,  odor,  taste  into  the  unity  or 

a  The  categories  are  the  forms  and  activities  of  judgment  as  ap¬ 
plied  to  the  matter  of  experience.  Thus  there  is  a  category,  or 
form  of  unification,  corresponding  to  every  judgment  form.  Kant 
treats  of  all  the  categories  fully,  but  it  is  not  necessary  here  to 
summarize  his  entire  treatment.  As  a  matter  of  fact  it  is  the 
categories  of  the  third  group — those  of  Relation — which  play  the 
most  important  role  in  Kant’s  Theory  of  Knowledge. 


2.  Quality 
Reality 
Negation 
Limitation 
4.  Modality 
Possibility — - 
Impossibility 
Existence — 
Nonexistence 
Necessity — 
Contingency 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  KANT 


229 


identity  of  an  orange.  (2)  Plurality.  The  mind,  in  order 
to  count  a  bag  of  oranges,  must  repeat,  say  twelve  times, 
its  identification  of  unity  and  add  or  synthesize  each  one 
to  the  previously  recognized  number,  as  it  goes  along. 
(3)  Substance.  The  mind  can  recognize  change  only  by 
reference  to  something  permanent.  Without  consciousness 
of  permanence  there  is  no  consciousness  of  change,  and 
vice  versa.  Were  we  not  conscious  of  the  identity  of  our  ex¬ 
periencing  and  thinking  self,  through  changing  experiences, 
we  could  never  be  conscious  of  change.  Could  we  not  recog¬ 
nize  change  in  our  experiences,  we  could  never  become 
conscious  of  permanence  or  identity. 

So  when  we  think  of  any  object,  for  example,  a  table  or 
a  mountain,  we  can  say  its  appearance  changes,  only  if  we 
recognize  an  identical  “it”  that  changes.  If  we  go  back 
to  the  old  boyhood  home,  we  can  say,  “It  is  not  changed 
much,  ’  ’  only  if  we  recognize  that  we  and  other  things  have 
changed,  while  remaining  recognizably  the  same. 

(4)  Causality.  A  causal  relation  is  one  of  necessary  and 
irreversible  sequence.  A  is  the  cause  of  B  means  that  it 
is  necessary  that  A  should  first  occur  if  there  is  to  be  an 
occurrence  of  B.  But  from  sense  experience  alone  we  could 
never  derive  the  idea  of  necessary  and  irreversible  sequence. 

Now,  the  use  or  application  of  all  the  categories  means 
always  synthesis ,  organization ,  or  unification ,  in  some 
fashion,  of  the  chaotic  manifold  of  sense  experience. 
Knowledge  involves  both  analysis  and  synthesis ;  but  there 
can  be  nothing  recognized  as  individual,  concrete,  and  per¬ 
sisting,  for  analysis,  unless  in  experience  there  has  already 
been  synthesis — the  putting  together  of  sensations.  We 
must  first  see  things  together  before  we  can  take  them  apart , 
and  we  cannot  see  things  together  unless  we  put  them  to¬ 
gether.  The  sense  organs  alone  wull  not  make  “things”  by 
putting  sensations  together.  The  mind  must  do  that.  Now 
the  basic  condition  of  all  synthesis  is  the  activity  of  a  syn - 


230 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


ihesizer,  that  can  know  itself  as  one  and  continuous  in  the 
successive  steps  of  synthesizing  activity.  Thus,  the  prime 
condition  of  science  is  the  activity  of  the  pure  or  transcen¬ 
dental  Ego,  the  synthetic  activity  of  the  nonempirical  self. 
By  calling  this  ego  “transcendental”  Kant  means  that  it 
transcends  sense  experience.  It  cannot  be  experienced,  hut 
it  is  the  logical  condition  of  there  being  an  articulate  and 
intelligible  experience.  All  the  categories  are  forms  of  the 
pure  self ’s  synthetic  activity.  The  ‘  ‘  I  think  ’  ’  must  be  pre¬ 
supposed  as  accompanying  all  judgment  and  conception. 

Suppose,  says  Kant,  I  draw  a  line.  In  order  to  recognize 
it  as  one  continuous  line,  I  must  synthesize  or  put  together 
the  succession  of  muscular  sensations  of  drawing  the  line 
and  the  visual  sensations  of  seeing  the  line  as  drawn.  This 
presupposes  that  I,  the  thinker,  continue  to  exist  as  such 
and  can  know  myself.  Suppose  I  go  on  drawing,  beyond 
what  I  can  see  as  one  segment  of  the  line.  I  must  put 
together  my  consciousness  of  what  I  am  now  doing  or 
experiencing  with  what  I  did  or  experienced  a  moment  ago. 
Suppose  I  leave  the  room  and,  coming  back  to-morrow,  say 
‘  ‘  there  is  the  line  I  drew  yesterday.  ’  ’  This  statement  pre¬ 
supposes  my  memory  or  consciousness  of  my  continuous 
identity  in  the  meantime.  Thus,  in  experiencing  anything 
intelligible,  seeing  a  single  thing  in  a  single  relation,  en¬ 
larging  the  scope  of  my  seeing  and  relating,  remembering 
and  recognizing,  there  is  presupposed  always  the  perma¬ 
nently  identical  synthetic  activity  of  the  pure  ego.  But  the 
ego  itself  can  never  be  experienced.  What  I  experience  of 
myself  is  always  of  a  changing  self.  But  I  could  not  ever 
know  myself  as  a  changing  self,  much  less  know  anything 
else,  if  there  were  not  functioning  in  me  the  pure  unchang¬ 
ing  and  universal  ego  of  synthetic  thinking.4 

“There  could  be  no  such  unity  of  consciousness  were  the 


4  The  mature  student  who  studies  the  views  of  English  and 
American  new  realists,  notably  those  of  Bertrand  Russell,  and 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  KANT 


231 


mind  not  able  to  be  conscious  of  the  identity  of  function, 
by  which  it  unites  various  phenomena  in  one  knowledge. 
The  original  and  necessary  consciousness  of  the  identity  of 
oneself  is  at  the  same  time  the  consciousness  of  a  necessary 
unity  in  the  synthesis  of  all  phenomena  according  to  con¬ 
ception.5  Combination  is  a  spontaneous  act  of  conscious¬ 
ness,  and,  as  such,  it  is  the  especial  characteristic  of  under¬ 
standing  as  distinguished  from  sense.”  6  “This  act  we  call 
by  the  general  name  of  synthesis  to  draw  attention  to  the 
fact  that  we  can  be  conscious  of  nothing  as  combined  in 
the  object  which  we  have  not  ourselves  previously  com¬ 
bined” — “the  resolution  or  analysis,  which  seems  to  be  its 
opposite,  in  point  of  fact  always  presupposes  it. ”  7  “It 
is  only  because  I  am  capable  of  combining  in  one  conscious¬ 
ness  the  various  determinations  presented  to  me,  that  I  can 
become  aware  that  in  every  one  of  them  the  consciousness 
is  the  same.”  8 

And  the  human  understanding  prescribes  or  puts  into 
sense  experience  the  laws  of  nature.  Nature  is  objective , 


Perry,  Marvin,  and  Spaulding  and  the  other  Americans  who  have 
collaborated  in  the  work  called  The  New  Realism,  will  note  that 
these  writers  seem  to  agree  with  Kant  and  the  objective  idealists 
in  holding  that  the  mind  has  a  knowledge  of  logical,  mathematical, 
and  ethical  universals  or  concepts  as  well  as  of  sense  percepts  and 
that  these  universals  exist  (or  subsist)  in  the  universe.  But, 
whereas  Kant  and  the  objective  idealists  argue  that  universals  can 
exist  or  subsist  only  in  and  for  an  active  or  thinking  Ego,  the 
New  Realists  seem  to  deny  that  mind  has  any  other  function  than 
simply  to  see  or  recognize  the  universals,  which  exist  independent 
of  it.  Hence  they  deny  that  the  reality  or  validity  of  universals 
constitutes  an  argument  for  the  doctrine  that  the  world  of  truth  or 
existence  depends  for  its  existence  on  a  mind.  In  this  respect 
they  claim  to  be  true  to  the  standpoint  of  Plato,  but  they  differ 
from  Plato  in  that  they  deny  that  the  universals  constitute  a  system 
or  organized  totality.  Objective  idealists  argue,  in  the  spirit  of 
Kant,  that  Plato's  doctrine  of  the  systematic  unity  of  universals, 
when  thought  through,  leads  necessarily  to  the  hypothesis  of  a  uni¬ 
versal  mind  as  ground  of  the  order  and  connection  of  all  things  into 
a  cosmos,  which  order  and  connection  is  involved  in  the  reality  of 
universals.  (Of.  Chapter  XXIV.) 

5  Watson,  Selections  from  Kant,  p.  62. 

e  Ibid.,  p.  63.  7  Ibid.,  pp.  63-64. 


6  Ibid.,  p.  66. 


232 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


in  the  sense  of  being  the  same  for  all  beings  endowed  with 
and  dependent  for  their  knowledge  on  the  same  senses 
and  the  same  principles  of  thinking.  Nature  is  not  your 
individual  dream  or  mine.  But  nature,  or  the  world  of 
space-time-causality,  and  all  the  sense  qualities,  is  subjec¬ 
tive  or  phenomenal ,  in  the  sense  that  there  enters  into  its 
making  the  universal  forms  and  activities  of  the  human 
mind.  Nature  does  not  exist  apart  from  mind.  Of  what 
exists  apart  from  mind  we  can  have  no  knowledge. 

“Just  as  phenomena  have  no  existence  at  all,  apart  from 
a  subject  that  has  senses,  so  there  exist  no  laws  in  phe¬ 
nomena  apart  from  a  subject  that  has  understanding. 
Things  in  themselves  would  of  course  have  laws  of  their 
own,  even  if  they  did  not  come  within  the  knowledge  of  the 
subject  through  his  understanding.  But  phenomena  are 
merely  the  manner  in  which  things  appear  in  conscious¬ 
ness,  and  give  no  knowledge  of  what  things  may  be  in  them¬ 
selves.  As  mere  appearances  they  are  subject  to  no  law 
of  connection  but  that  which  is  imposed  by  the  connective 
faculty.  Now  it  is  imagination  that  connects  the  various 
units  of  sensuous  perception,  and  imagination  is  dependent 
upon  understanding  for  the  unity  of  its  intellectual  syn¬ 
thesis,  and  upon  sensibility  for  the  complexity  of  appre¬ 
hension.  But  nothing  can  come  under  observation  without 
synthesis  of  apprehension,  and  this  empirical  synthesis  is 
dependent  upon  the  transcendental  synthesis,  and  therefore 
upon  the  categories.  ...  In  the  categories,  therefore, 
nature  as  a  system  of  necessary  laws  has  its  ground  and 
origin.  ...  To  learn  what  are  the  special  laws  of  nature, 
we  must  go  to  experience ;  but  it  is  none  the  less  true  that 
only  the  a  priori  laws  imposed  by  understanding  tell  us 
what  is  necessary  for  any  experience  whatever,  and  what  is 
capable  of  being  known  as  object  of  experience.  ’  ’ 9 


9  Watson,  Selections  from  Kant ,  pp.  80-81. 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  KANT 


233 


Thus,  for  Kant,  science,  and  nature  as  the  object  of  sci¬ 
ence,  are  constituted  by  the  interaction  of  the  pure  Ego  with 
the  materials  of  sense  perception.  Where  there  is  no  sense 
experience,  there  can  be  no  knowledge.  ‘  ‘  Thinking  without 
percepts  is  empty.”  But  sense  experience  means  nothing 
without  thought.  “Percepts  without  concepts  are  blind.” 
The  categories  have  no  application  beyond  the  limits  of  pos¬ 
sible  sense  experience.  What  lies  beyond?  We  know  not. 
There  must  be  Something,  the  unknown  ground  of  our 
sense  experience,  but  what  it  is  like,  or  how  it  produces 
sensation  in  us,  we  cannot  know.  We  know  only  appear¬ 
ances,  phenomena.  Things-in-themselves  are  forever  hid¬ 
den  from  our  gaze.  Between  the  nature  of  things  as  they 
are  in  themselves  and  our  knowledge  there  is  always  inter¬ 
posed  the  forms  of  our  perceptions  and  thinking — space, 
time,  and  the  categories.  But  Kant  thinks  that,  though  we 
can  have  no  positive  knowledge  of  the  nature  of  things  in 
themselves,  we  have  negative  knowledge.  Since  space  and 
time  are  human  forms  of  perception,  things-in-themselves 
need  not  be  subject  to  the  laws  of  empirical  causality  and 
substantiality.  There  may,  in  the  world  of  noumena,  or 
ultimate  reality,  be  a  self-existent,  eternal  being,  a  causeless 
freedom  and  immortal  souls.  Kant,  starting  from  the  re¬ 
sults  of  his  analysis  of  knowledge,  namely  that  space  and 
time  are  human  forms  of  perception  and  the  categories 
human  forms  of  synthetic  thinking,  and  that  these  imply 
in  man  an  active  principle  of  intellectual  synthesis,  pro¬ 
ceeds  to  the  seemingly  gratuitous  assumption  that  space, 
time,  and  the  categories  do  not  apply  to  things  as  they  are 
in  themselves.  Why  did  he  not  recognize  that  the  real 
world  must  have  something  corresponding  to  spatial  and 
temporal  order  and  to  causal  relations?  In  fact  he  is  in¬ 
consistent,  for  he  does  apply  unity,  plurality,  totality,  and 
substance  or  self-existent  being  to  his  own  thought  about 
Noumena  or  Things-in-Themselves.  He  even  unconsciously 


234 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


applies  causality,  for  lie  assumes  that  things-in-themselves 
cause  our  sense  experiences. 

The  answer  to  these  questions  lies  in  Kant’s  Dialectic. 
He  finds  there  that  the  attempt,  on  the  part  of  Reason,  to 
reach  ultimate  or  total  conceptions  leads  to  contradictory 
conclusions.  Attempt  to  conceive  the  universe  as  a  totality 
in  space  and  time,  and  as  a  total  system  or  community  of 
casual  relations,  says  Kant,  and  you  run  into  the  following 
inescapable  conflicts  of  reason  with  itself:  (1)  You  can 
prove,  with  equal  cogency,  that  the  world  must  be  infinite 
spatially  and  that  it  must  be  finite  spatially;  (2)  that  it 
must  be  eternal  and  that  it  must  have  had  a  beginning ; 

(3)  that  there  must  be  and  there  cannot  be  free  causality; 

(4)  that  there  must  be  and  that  there  cannot  be  a  self- 
existing  being. 

Now,  if  space,  time,  and  causality  have  no  application  to 
the  nonmental  realities  or  things-in-themselves,  then  these 
contradictions  are  resolved.  If  the  ultimate  reality  be 
spaceless  and  timeless  the  above  contradictions  are  abol¬ 
ished.  There  may  be  freedom,  creative  beginnings,  and  a 
self -existent  being,  in  the  nontemporal  and  nonspatial  realm 
of  reality.  It  is  clear  that  Kant  thought  he  was,  once  for 
all,  achieving  the  liberation  of  faith  from  the  thraldom  of 
skepticism,  by  rightly  limiting  the  application  of  the  forms 
of  thinking  to  the  field  of  sense  experience.  From  the 
theoretical  standpoint  the  noumenal  world,  the  realm  of 
things-in-themselves,  is  but  the  concept  of  a  limit  to  man’s 
possible  experience  and,  hence,  to  the  possibility  of  scien¬ 
tific  knowledge.  The  reason  demands  totality  or  complete¬ 
ness,  but  scientific  thinking  cannot  attain  to  any  positive 
concepts  of  totality.  We  must  think  the  ideas  of  God  or  a 
self -existent  being,  of  freedom  and  immortality,  but  we 
cannot  know  them  as  objects  either  of  science  or  meta¬ 
physics.  They  are  necessary  regulative  ideas.  In  other 
words,  they  are  ideals,  toward  which  our  knowledge  may 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  KANT  235 

seek  indefinitely  to  approximate,  but  forever  and  forever 
they  elude  the  grasp  of  science. 

“It  may  seem  from  this  that  the  result  of  our  critical 
investigation  is  purely  negative ,  and  merely  warns  us  not 
to  venture  with  speculative  reason  beyond  the  limits  of 
experience.  And  no  doubt  this  is  its  first  use ;  but  a  positive 
result  is  obtained  when  it  is  seen  that  the  principles  with 
which  speculative  reason  ventures  beyond  its  proper  limits, 
in  reality  do  not  extend  the  province  of  reason,  but  inev¬ 
itably  narrow  it.  For,  in  seeking  to  go  altogether  beyond 
its  true  limits,  the  limits  of  sensibility,  those  principles 
threaten  to  supplant  pure  reason  in  its  practical  aspect. 
Let  us  suppose  that  the  necessary  distinction  wThich  our 
criticism  shows  to  exist  between  things  as  objects  of  experi¬ 
ence  and  the  same  things  as  they  are  in  themselves,  had  not 
been  made.  Then  the  principle  of  causality,  and  with  it  the 
mechanical  conception  of  nature  as  determined  by  it,  would 
apply  to  all  things  in  general  as  efficient  causes.  Hence  I 
could  not,  without  palpable  contradiction,  say  of  the  same 
being,  for  instance  the  human  soul,  that  its  will  is  free, 
and  yet  is  subject  to  the  necessity  of  nature,  that  is,  is 
not  free.  But,  if  our  criticism  is  sound  and  the  object 
may  be  taken  in  two  distinct  senses,  on  the  one  hand  as  a 
phenomenon,  and  on  the  other  hand  as  a  thing-in-itself, 
there  is  no  contradiction  in  supposing  that  the  very  same 
will,  in  its  visible  acts  as  a  phenomenon  is  not  free,  but 
necessarily  subject  to  the  law  of  nature,  while  yet,  as  be¬ 
longing  to  a  thing-in-itself,  it  is  not  subject  to  that  law, 
but  is  free.  Now,  morality  requires  us  only  to  be  able  to 
think  freedom  without  contradiction,  not  to  understand 
it.  .  .  .  From  the  critical  point  of  view,  therefore,  the  doc¬ 
trine  of  morality  and  the  doctrine  of  nature  may  each  be 
true  in  its  own  sphere,  which  could  never  have  been  shown 
had  not  criticism  previously  established  our  unavoidable 
ignorance  of  things  in  themselves,  and  limited  all  that 


236 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


we  can  know  to  mere  phenomena.  I  have,  therefore,  found 
it  necessary  to  deny  knowledge  of  God,  freedom,  and  im¬ 
morality,  in  order  to  find  place  for  faith.”10 

The  postulates  of  the  practical  reason,  that  is,  the  de¬ 
mands  of  a  faith  which  has  its  origin  in  the  moral  will, 
carry  us  across  the  gulf  impassable  by  theoretical  reason. 
The  Ideas  of  God,  Freedom,  and  Immortality,  which  ever 
transcend  the  reach  of  science,  become  immanent  for  the 
practical  or  moral  consciousness,  on  the  guidance  of  which 
depends  man’s  fulfillment  of  his  moral  vocation.  The  com¬ 
mands  of  duty  are  absolute,  unqualified.  The  voice  within 
us,  the  voice  of  conscience,  utters  the  categorical  impera¬ 
tive  “Thou  shalt  not  do  thus  and  so!”  and  “Thou  shalt 
do  thus  and  so !  ”  The  Right  is  the  Good-in-itself .  There 
is  nothing  Good-in-itself  except  the  Good  Will,  and  the 
Good  Will  is  the  will  of  a  rational  self-determining  per¬ 
sonality  which,  in  knowing  and  willing  the  Good,  knows  and 
wills  into  action  its  own  true  nature.  In  the  last  analysis, 
only  moral  personalities  are  absolutely  the  subjects  and 
objects  of  moral  volition  and  valuation.  But,  if  thou 
oughtest  unqualifiedly,  then  thou  canst,  Du  sollst  denn  du 
kanst. 


So  nigh  is  grandeur  to  our  dust, 

So  near  is  God  to  man, 

When  Duty  whispers  low,  Thou  must, 

The  youth  replies,  I  can. 

The  absolutely  binding  character  of  the  moral  imperative 
involves  moral  freedom  or  the  power  to  obey  the  impera¬ 
tive.  Hence  we  have  a  practical  consciousness  of  freedom. 
Through  the  sense  of  duty  we  know  that  we  must  be  free; 
through  freedom  we  are  able  to  obey  the  commands  of 
duty,  and  thus  to  fulfil  the  law  of  our  spiritual  being. 


10  Watson,  Selections  from  Kant ,  pp.  5-6. 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  KANT 


237 


But  the  fulfillment  of  our  moral  vocation  is  an  endless 
task.  We  must  live  eternally,  since,  if  to  strive  ceaselessly 
after  moral  perfection  be  our  true  calling,  the  beginning 
that  we  make  here  on  earth  opens  to  our  spiritual  eye  dim 
and  distant  vistas  of  the  pathway  which  prolongs  itself 
ahead  into  a  future  life  in  which  we  approach  ever  more 
nearly  towards  perfection.  Thus  immortality  is  the  second 
postulate  of  the  moral  life. 

And,  if  this  moral  vocation  of  man  be  not  a  mocking  delu¬ 
sion,  if  it  be  a  realisable  ideal,  then  the  whole  of  nature 
must  be  subservient  to  the  moral  order.  Virtue  and  happi¬ 
ness,  which  by  no  means  coincide  here  and  now,  must,  in 
the  long  run,  coincide.  Righteousness  must  triumph  and 
rule  in  the  cosmos.  And,  since  only  a  will  is  righteous 
and  good,  the  third  and  crowning  postulate  of  the  moral 
life  is  that  God  exists  as  the  righteous  will  who  governs 
the  universal  order.  Thus  the  highest  objects  of  reason’s 
quest  which,  from  the  theoretical  standpoint,  were  prob¬ 
lematical,  become,  from  the  practical  standpoint  of  the 
moral  life,  the  objects  and  abiding  place  of  a  reasonable 
faith.  In  our  scientific  knowledge  we  are  strictly  limited  to 
the  space-time  world  of  sensuous  phenomena,  with  its  end¬ 
less  and  iron-bound  causal  sequences.  In  this  world  our 
bodies  and  our  empirical  selves  are  but  ephemeral  frag¬ 
ments,  whose  origin,  career,  and  decease  are  as  inevitable  as 
the  course  of  a  mote  or  a  planet.  We  find,  in  the  phe¬ 
nomenal  realm,  no  freedom,  no  God,  and  no  self,  except  the 
logically  presupposed  self  of  the  pure  universal  thinker, 
the  principle  of  intellectual  synthesis.  But  this  whole 
phenomenal  order  is  incomplete  and  dependent.  Through 
moral  insight  we  are  led  to  see  that  it  is  but  the  appearance 
of  the  noumenal  or  spiritual  order,  in  which,  for  moral 
faith,  God,  freedom,  and  immortal  souls  are  the  supreme 
and  abiding  realities. 

But,  we  ask,  what  is  the  relation  of  faith  to  science? 


238 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


What  is  the  positive  relation  of  the  phenomenal  or  space- 
time  world  to  the  spaceless  and  timeless  world  of  the  self- 
existent  God  and  free  moral  causality  ?  What  is  the 
relation  of  my  empirical  and  ever  changing  selfhood  to 
my  spiritual  or  free  selfhood?  What  is  the  relation  be¬ 
tween  that  timeless  act  of  freedom,  by  which  a  moral  will 
begins  a  series  in  time,  and  the  temporal  phenomenal 
causal  order  which  has  neither  first  nor  last  term?  How 
can  I  be  both  creatively  free  and  temporally  determined? 
Empirically,  my  every  volition,  as  well  as  my  every  bodily 
movement,  is  caused  by  antecedents.  When,  then,  and  how, 
can  I,  by  an  act  of  free  obedience  to  duty,  break  through 
this  iron  sequence?  What  is  the  relation  of  God  to  nature? 
How  can  the  world  of  time  be  the  appearance  of  a  timeless 
world  ?  And  is  not  the  appeal  to  moral  consciousness,  as 
the  key  to  the  interpretation  of  the  noumenon  or  thing-in- 
itself,  an  appeal  to  experience?  Does  not  Kant  himself 
depart  from  his  narrow  limitation  of  experience  to  what 
comes  through  the  avenues  of  the  outer  senses,  when  he 
tries  to  analyze  and  to  interpret  the  philosophical  signifi¬ 
cance  of  man’s  moral  life?  Are  not  the  moral  experiences 
of  the  individual,  and  the  moral  history  of  the  race,  truly 
valid  bases  for  philosophical  construction  ? 

Kant  was  feeling  his  way  tentatively  towards  a  richer 
and  more  unified  concept  of  experience,  when,  in  his 
Critique  of  Judgment,  he  argued,  that  in  the  judgments 
of  aesthetic  feeling,  in  other  words,  in  the  experiences  and 
valuations  of  beauty,  grandeur,  sublimity,  which  we  have 
in  the  contemplation  of  nature  and  of  works  of  art,  we 
have  hints  of  how  the  gaps  might  be  closed  between  the 
sensible  and  the  supersensible  worlds.  We  cannot  help 
seeing  purpose  in  nature,  especially  in  living  organisms, 
and  we  cannot  help  feeling  beauty  in  nature  and  art. 
Beauty  is  the  feeling  of  the  perfect  harmony  of  the  world 
with  intelligence.  The  judgment  of  purpose  in  nature  gives 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  KANT 


239 


us  the  idea  of  the  world  as  an  organic  system.  The  per¬ 
ception  of  beauty  in  nature  seems  to  show  us  an  organismic 
teleology.  It  suggests  a  cosmic  purposiveness,  operating 
in  ways  other  than  the  halting  and  circumscribed  pur¬ 
posiveness  of  human  endeavor.  Thus,  in  judgments  of 
purpose  and  of  aesthetic  feeling,  we  get  suggestions  as  to 
how  the  world  of  nature  may  be  a  living  and  worthful 
whole,  one  organism  and  life,  which  owes  its  existence  and 
its  continuance  in  existence  to  the  creative  and  intuitive 
intelligence  of  a  Cosmic  Thinker,  who  in  thinking  creates 
the  objects  of  his  thought,  in  whose  mind  there  is  no  pas¬ 
sivity,  who  is  not  dependent  on  the  reception  of  sensory 
stimulations  for  the  materials  of  his  knowledge  and  who, 
hence,  has  no  need  of  thinking  discursively ;  that  is,  of 
proceeding  step  by  step  by  synthesis  and  analysis  from 
the  particular  to  the  universal.  Art,  the  creation  of  human 
genius,  is  produced  without  deliberate  design  by  an  intel¬ 
ligence  which  works  like  nature.  This  notion  of  a  cosmic 
Intuitive  Intellect  or  Creative  Reason,  whose  nature  is 
adumbrated  by  the  Creative  imaginative  work  of  the  human 
artist  or  genius,  is  evidently  one  to  which  Kant  returned 
again  and  again.  We  find  it  in  the  early  stages  of  the 
Critique  of  Pure  Reason 11  and  in  the  last  pages  of  his  last 
great  work,  the  Critique  of  Judgment}2 

This  notion  of  a  creative  or  intuitive  thinker,  put  out 
tentatively  by  Kant,  plays  an  important  part  in  the  phi¬ 
losophy  of  his  followers,  Fichte,  Schelling,  Schleiermacher 
and  Hegel.13 

n  Watson,  Selections  from  Kant,  p.  67,  “An  understanding  in 
which  the  consciousness  of  self  should  at  the  same  time  be  a  con¬ 
sciousness  of  all  the  complex  determinations  of  objects  would  be 
perceptive.” 

12  Ibid.,  pp.  339-342. 

13  It  will  prove  interesting  to  compare  Kant’s  attempt  to  bridge 
the  gulf  between  Nature  and  Spirit  with  that  of  Plato  in  his  doc¬ 
trine  that  particular  and  sensuous  objects  participate  in  or  imitate 
the  ideas  or  eternal  forms,  of  which  the  essential  form  of  the  Good 
is  the  supreme  and  organizing  principle;  with  Plotinus’  doctrine 


240 


THS  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


The  philosophy  of  Kant  is  epoch  making.  It  was  the 
most  powerful  influence,  along  with  the  philosophy  of  the 
French  enlightenment  (which,  in  turn,  was  a  populariza¬ 
tion,  by  Voltaire  and  others,  of  the  ideas  of  Locke,  Hume, 
Newton,  Lord  Shaftesbury,  and  the  English  moral  philoso¬ 
phers),  and  the  social  philosophy  of  Rousseau,  in  bringing 
to  pass  a  shift  of  emphasis  from  the  ontological  problems 
of  substance  to  the  problems  of  human  nature — from  the 
problems  of  the  Mind-body  and  Spirit-matter  relationships, 
to  the  problems  of  human  knowledge,  human  association, 
and  the  evolution  of  human  culture.  After  Kant,  phi¬ 
losophy  in  Germany  was  concerned  chiefly  with  the  in¬ 
terpretation  of  human  society  and  the  meaning  of  man’s 
cultural  development — with  the  evolution  of  human 
institutions  and  ideas.  In  other  words,  philosophy  becomes, 
after  Kant,  primarily  a  study  and  interpretation  of  the 
meanings,  for  the  development  of  the  human  spirit,  of 
morality,  law,  the  state,  science,  art,  and  religion,  all  from 
the  historical  point  of  view.  Later  idealism  is  an  idealistic 
reading  of  man’s  cultural  history,  as  being  the  most  im¬ 
portant  key  to  the  meaning  of  reality  as  a  whole.  This 
movement  achieved,  as  we  shall  see,  its  greatest  results  in 
Hegel. 

For  Kant’s  philosophy  of  history  see  Chapter  XXVIII. 

References 

*  Adamson,  Robert,  The  Philosophy  of  Kant. 

*  Avey,  A.  E.,  Headings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  XVII. 

Caird,  Edward,  The  Critical  Philosophy  of  Kant. 

of  the  series  of  emanations  or  outflows  from  the  one,  through  rea¬ 
son  (spirit)  and  soul  to  body;  with  that  of  Spinoza  in  his  argument 
that  nature  is  the  necessary  expression  of  the  eternal  Divine  sub¬ 
stance  which  appears  to  us  in  two  parallel  ways  as  Body  and  Mind, 
but  the  key  to  the  nature  of  which  is  found  in  the  human  mind’s 
capacity  to  see  all  things  natural  under  the  form  of  eternity;  and 
finally  with  the  doctrine  of  Fichte,  Schelling,  and  Hegel  that  nature 
is  the  unconscious  or  externalized  expression  of  spirit. 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  KANT 


241 


Kant,  Critique  of  Judgment  (translated  by  Bernard). 

*  Kant,  Critique  of  Pure  Peason  (translated  by  Max  Miiller). 
Kant,  Ethical  Works  (translated  by  T.  K.  Abbott),  or  Meta¬ 
physics  of  Morals  (translated  by  Semple). 

Kant,  Philosophy  of  Law  and  Principles  of  Politics  (translated 
by  W.  Hastie). 

Kant,  Prolegomena  (translated  by  Mahaffy  and  Bernard). 
Kant,  Religion  (translated  by  Semple). 

Kemp- Smith,  Norman  R.,  A  Commentary  on  Kant. 

*  Lindsay,  A.  D.,  The  Philosophy  of  Kant. 

Meredith,  J.  C.,  Kant’s  Critique  of  Judgment. 

*  Paulsen,  Frederick,  Kant  (translated  by  Creighton  and 

Lefevre). 

Prichard,  H.  A.,  Kant’s  Theory  of  Knowledge. 

*  Watson,  John,  The  Philosophy  of  Kant  Explained ,  and 

Selections  from  Kant. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 


SPIRITUALISM  OR  IDEALISM 

The  basic  thesis  of  this  standpoint,  in  its  principal 
modern  classic  forms,  is  that  only  minds  and  their  con¬ 
tents  exist.  To  my  mind  there  are  three  chief  forms  of 
idealism,  namely : 

1.  Berkeleyan  or  Subjective 

2.  Leibnitzian  or  Monadistic 

3.  Hegelian  or  Objective 

I.  Berkeleyan  Idealism 

The  essence  of  the  first  is  this :  Berkeley  argues  that 
our  knowledge  consists  of  notions  and  ideas  or  perceptions. 
By  notion  he  means  an  immediate  awareness  or  intuition 
of  the  self.  I  know  myself  directly  as  an  active  being, 
thinking,  perceiving,  and  willing.  In  addition  to  this  im¬ 
mediate  awareness  of  my  activity,  I  also  have  ideas.  Ideas 
are  the  sole  contents  or  stuff  of  our  experience  when  we 
perceive  things  by  means  of  the  senses.  The  being  of 
things  consists  in  being  perceived.  I  am  passive  or  recep¬ 
tive  in  having  ideas.  These  two,  Ideas  and  Notions,  ex¬ 
haust  the  whole  field  of  knowledge.  When  I  perceive  any 
object  such  as  desk,  tree,  snow,  I  have  a  congeries  of 
sense  qualities,  united  by  the  mind,  and  these  congeries 
I  call  things.  A  cherry,  for  instance,  consists  of  a  specific 
roundness,  smoothness,  size,  color,  taste,  odor,  and  interior 

structure,  united  by  the  mind  into  this  thing.  There  is 

242 


SPIRITUALISM  OR  IDEALISM 


243 


nothing  behind  the  group  of  sense  qualities ,  which  is,  hence, 
the  real  cherry.  By  things  Berkeley  means  just  what  one 
perceives. 

The  field  of  knowledge  includes,  then,  notions  and  ideas. 
Notion  is  a  knowledge  of  the  spirit  as  an  acting  subject. 
In  perception  we  know  that  we  are  relatively  passive.  Our 
perceptions  are  received  by  us ;  they  must,  therefore,  have 
a  cause  which  is  independent  of  ourselves.  We  are  con¬ 
tinually  distinguishing  between  those  images  that  are,  and 
those  that  are  not,  under  our  control.  We  know  that  we 
do  not  cause  our  perceptions.  I  cannot  help  seeing,  feeling, 
hearing,  the  content  of  my  present  field  of  perception. 
There  is  involved  in  perception  a  degree  of  constancy  and 
a  type  of  order  which  attests  the  independent  character 
of  the  cause  of  our  perceptions. 

What  causes  our  perceptions?  We  have  seen  that  the 
materialist  argues  that  the  cause  is  matter,  or  a  substance 
which  is  very  different  from  our  perceptions.  The  mate¬ 
rialist  argues  that  matter  has  the  primary  qualities  in 
minute,  imperceptible  forms,  but  is  eviscerated  of  all  sec¬ 
ondary  qualities.  This  distinction,  says  Berkeley,  is  illogi¬ 
cal.  If  the  primary  qualities  are  objective,  so  also  are  the 
secondary.  Berkeley  convincingly  and  irrefutably  shows 
that  all  qualities  are  on  the  same  footing,  since  they  are 
perceived  in  the  same  manner  and  subject  to  the  same 
conditions ;  and  the  one  set  of  qualities  is  never  perceived 
apart  from  the  other.  For  instance,  shape,  size,  texture, 
and  motion  are  never  perceived  apart  from  color.  The 
ordinary  assumption  of  the  believer  in  a  material  sub¬ 
stance  is  that  ideas  are  copies  in  our  mind  of  the  indepen¬ 
dent  matter.  Now  Berkeley  asks,  if  we  cannot  perceive 
matter,  how  can  we  know  that  there  is  matter?  And  if 
we  can  perceive  matter,  then  matter  is  the  content  of  the 
act  of  perception.  We  cannot  know  the  relation  between 
ideas  and  matter  if  we  do  not  perceive  matter.  Berkeley 


244 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


says  that  the  material  world  of  common  sense  is  only 
perception.  Perception  must  have  an  objective  cause. 
We  have  no  knowledge  of  matter  as  a  cause.  We  do  know, 
however,  that  we,  as  selves  or  spirits ,  are  causes.  We  are 
conscious  of  producing  changes  in  the  world,  therefore  the 
cause  of  our  perceptions  must  be  a  spirit.  As  our  percep¬ 
tions  show  order,  regularity,  and  an  intelligible  structure, 
so  the  cause  of  our  perceptions  must  be  the  incessant 
operation  of  a  spirit  which  has  such  an  intelligible  char¬ 
acter,  as  being  the  rational  and  permanent  source  of  the 
constancy  and  order  in  our  perceptual  experience.  Since 
our  spirits  are  progressively  discovering  ever  more  order 
and  meaning  in  the  realm  of  sense  perception,  the  Ground 
or  Cause  of  the  latter  must  be  essentiallv  akin  in  nature  to 
the  spirit  of  man. 

Mind  I  know  intuitively — by  a  notion — as  a  thinking, 
acting  principle.  I  thus  know  mind  as  the  spiritual  support 
of  ideas.  There  is,  therefore,  no  independent  material  sub¬ 
stance  for  Berkeley.  Nature  is  literally  the  living  garment 
of  the  Deitv.  The  world  of  nature,  “the  whole  choir  of 
heaven  and  furniture  of  earth,  ”  is  a  divine,  visual  lan¬ 
guage.  Just  as  I  infer  from  your  looks  that  you  are  in¬ 
telligent,  so  I  infer  that  an  infinite,  omnipresent,  intelligent 
principle  is  speaking  to  me  through  nature.  Nature  is  not 
a  garment  that  hides  the  Deity,  nor  is  nature  a  body  of 
thought  forms  which  hide  reality  from  the  percipient  indi¬ 
vidual.  Nature  is  the  direct  revelation  of  God’s  intelligent 
and  benevolent  will. 

I  do  not  perceive  my  f ellowman ’s  spirit  directly,  but  I  do 
infer  from  his  actions  that  there  is  a  spirit.  So  I  infer 
from  the  order,  utility,  and  beauty  of  nature  that  there  is 
a  Supreme  Spirit.  There  is  also  this  important  difference 
between  our  perceptions  of  nature  and  of  other  finite  selves. 
Nature  we  have  constantly  before  us  as  a  manifestation 
of  the  power  and  intelligence  of  the  Supreme  Spirit, 


SPIRITUALISM  OR  IDEALISM 


245 


whereas  human  individuals  do  not  bear  this  constant  rela¬ 
tion  to  us.  Since  nature  therefore  is  a  language  to  man, 
all  he  has  to  do  is  to  study  it  and  it  speaks.  Berkeley 
would  say  that  the  whole  technic,  both  mathematical  and 
experimental,  of  modern  science  are  but  elements  in  the 
process  of  learning  nature’s  tongue.  Do  we  eat  and  drink 
ideas  when  we  eat  and  drink  sense  objects?  Yes.  But  it 
is.  however,  only  a  question  of  names  at  this  point.  Berkeley 
insists  that  his  view  is  the  common  man's  view.  The  ma¬ 
terialist  philosopher  says  that  what  you  perceive  is  not 
matter.  Back  of  what  you  perceive,  says  Berkeley,  the 
materialist  postulates  some  thoughtless,  stupid,  unintelli¬ 
gible  thing.  It  is  the  futility  of  this  postulate  that  Berkeley 
is  seeking  to  show.  He  argues  that  such  a  postulate  will 
not  explain  the  facts  of  perception.  AYhen  Dr.  Johnson 
kicked  the  stone  and  it  hurt,  he  did  not  refute  Berkeley. 
It  is  the  materialist  who  deprives  our  sense  impressions  of 
their  reality.  Esse  est  per  dpi,  this  famous  expression, 
which  has  often  been  taken  to  be  the  whole  of  Berkeley’s 
system,  is  in  reality  only  its  beginning.  The  divine  mind 
is  the  cause  of  our  perceptions,  and  it  is  the  cause  of  the 
continued  existence  of  things  when  we  do  not  perceive 
them.  Mind  is  the  only  conceivable  cause  of  our  ideas 
and  perceptions.  God  is  the  universal  intelligence  which 
we  conceive  on  the  analogy  of  our  own  existence  as  think- 
ing.  willing  selves. 

There  are  certain  fundamental  difficulties  in  Berkeley. 
Nature  for  him  is  simply  the  effect  in  human  minds  of 
the  continuous  activity  of  the  divine  mind.  From  this 
standpoint,  what  becomes  of  the  past  history  of  nature, 
of  the  genesis  of  the  solar  system ;  in  short,  what  becomes 
of  the  whole  world  before  man  appeared  ?  Nature  is  simply 
a  continuous  manifestation  of  the  divine  mind  to  finite 
minds,  on  Berkeley's  premises.  This  continuous  mani¬ 
festation  of  the  divine  is  all  there  is  to  nature.  At  this 


246 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


point  we  see,  therefore,  that  Berkeley  deprives  nature  of 
any  existence  on  its  own  account.  This  is  one  of  the  two 
chief  difficulties  in  his  system.  His  doctrine  is  also  un¬ 
satisfactory  in  the  solution  it  offers  of  the  relations  of  one 
finite  mind  to  another  and  to  God.  Your  body  from  your 
point  of  view  is  the  effect  of  the  divine  will  acting  upon 
your  mind.  But  your  body  as  I  perceive  it  is  the  effect 
of  the  action  of  the  divine  will  on  my  mind.  Here  arises 
a  serious  difficulty.  How  can  I  distinguish  between  my 
body  as  I  perceive  it  and  my  body  as  you  perceive  it? 
This  question  is  not  satisfactorily  answered  in  Berkeleyan 
idealism.  As  James  has  said,  my  appreciation  of  my  own 
body  has  a  peculiar  warmth  and  intimacy  which  I  never 
experience  in  connection  with  my  perceptions  of  your  body. 
Never  do  I  perceive  your  toothache  quite  as  I  do  my  own. 
Never  do  I  perceive  your  difficulties  as  I  do  my  own.  Why 
feel  in  such  an  intimate  way  the  action  of  the  divine  mind 
which  I  call  my  body,  if  the  whole  world  is  perceptual 
content  ?  Why  is  there  not  the  same  emotional  tang  to  all 
my  experiences?  If  body  is  what  I  perceive  and  only  that, 
then  Berkeley’s  theory  fails  to  account  for  this  patent 
fact. 

Berkeley  argues  that  the  constancy,  coherence,  and  inde¬ 
pendence,  in  the  order  of  our  perceptions  of  things  justify 
the  inference  that  nature  is  the  continuous  expression  of 
the  Divine  Mind  to  our  minds,  just  as  the  constancy  and 
independence  of  my  will,  in  my  perception  of  your  body, 
leads  me  to  infer  that  your  mind  speaks  to  me  through 
your  body.  But  your  body  is  a  part  of  the  same  total  and 
continuous  natural  order  of  perceptions  to  which  belong 
my  perceptions  of  inanimate  things.  By  parity  of  reason¬ 
ing,  then,  one  might  infer  a  mind  in  every  natural  object, 
instead  of  One  Divine  Mind  in  all  things.  If  the  indi¬ 
vidual  body  is  simply  an  effect  of  the  action  of  one  finite 
mind  on  another,  it  would  follow  that  the  whole  of  nature 


SPIRITUALISM  OR  IDEALISM 


247 


is  but  the  sum  of  the  effects  of  all  other  finite  minds  on  the 
mind  of  the  percipient.  Thus  Berkeley  assumes  the  inde¬ 
pendent  realness  of  our  percepts  of  one  another’s  bodies, 
and  then  argues  that  the  remainder  of  our  percepts  (that 
is,  the  physical  world)  is  the  direct  expression  to  us  of 
God’s  mind.  Thus  his  argument  at  once  assumes  and 
denies  that  human  bodies,  and  the  minds  associated  with 
them,  exist  independently  of  the  divine  mind. 

In  conclusion  we  may  say  that  Berkeley’s  theory  does 
not  give  us  a  satisfactory  doctrine  of  nature,  nor  does  it 
account  for  the  uniqueness  and  the  discreteness  of  selves. 

II.  Leibnitz’s  Monadology 

Leibnitz’s  doctrine  avoids  one  of  Berkeley’s  difficulties. 
Leibnitz  starts  from  the  idea  of  substance.  He  is  thus  in 
agreement  with  the  other  chief  thinkers  of  the  time  in 
making  substance  the  central  explanatory  principle.  He 
sets  up  a  plurality  of  monads ,  or  individual  substances. 
Now  a  monad  is  a  center  of  force  or  of  desire  and  activity. 
We  may  almost  say  that  a  monad  is  an  animated  point.  In 
this  respect  Leibnitz  shows  profoundly  the  influence  of  the 
mathematics  of  his  day.  Galileo,  in  describing  the  path 
of  moving  bodies,  called  the  differential  a  point  of  tendency 
and  at  no  time  in  the  physical  series  does  Galileo  resort 
to  rest,  as  did  Archimedes,  as  the  final  point  of  explana¬ 
tion.  So  here  Leibnitz  comes  not  to  a  position  of  equi¬ 
librium  or  rest,  but  to  force.  The  whole  universe  consists 
of  an  infinite  number  of  centers  of  desire  or  striving. 
There  are  three  kinds  of  monads,  namely : 

1.  Body  monad  (animated  molecule) 

2.  Soul  monad  (monad  having  memory  or  conscious 
continuity) 

3.  Spirit  monad  (a  thinking  center  that  reflects,  thinks 
in  conceptual  terms,  and  sets  up  ends) 


248 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


All  physical  bodies  are  made  up  of  monads.  All  living 
bodies  have  soul  monads.  Human  bodies  are  governed 
by  spirit  monads.  These  centers  of  force  and  feeling  ex¬ 
haust  the  whole  content  of  the  world. 

The  monad  develops  from  within.  The  history  of  the 
monad  is  a  consequence  of  inner  impulsion  and  not  of 
external  impact.  Here  also  we  find  employed  the  concep¬ 
tion  that  Galileo,  Huyghens,  and  other  physicists  of  the 
time  worked  out,  of  the  nature  of  a  point  of  any  function 
as  expressed  by  the  differential. 

Every  monad  is  in  some  degree  a  soul  or  self.  Even 
the  body  monads  are  rudimentary  selves,  that  is,  they  are 
low  grade  centers  of  feeling  or  desire.  Each  monad  mir¬ 
rors  or  reflects  the  universe,  and  its  development  is  entirely 
from  its  own  internal  impulse.  It  is  self-active.  The 
monad  produces  no  change  in  any  other  one.  Each  de¬ 
velops  solely  by  the  law  of  its  own  being.  In  this  aspect, 
Leibnitz  expresses  the  central  core  of  the  mathematics  of 
his  day.  The  monad,  in  addition  to  being  a  point  express¬ 
ing  the  law  of  an  entire  series,  is  also  a  complex  unity.  It 
is  the  true  type  of  that  which  is  both  one  and  many,  both 
unity  and  complexity.  The  best  analogy  of  such  a  func¬ 
tion  Leibnitz  finds  in  the  self  or  soul.  A  human  individual 
is  complex ;  it  includes  a  variety  of  impulses  in  a  unity  of 
feeling  and  purposive  activity. 

In  the  body  monad  there  are  only  dazed  flashes  of  con¬ 
sciousness,  and  from  the  lowest  body  monad  there  begins 
an  infinite  gradation  of  organization.  There  are  no  breaks 
in  nature ;  and  so  we  have  an  infinite  series  from  the  very 
lowest  up  to  the  most  rational  and  self-conscious  monad. 
This  may  be  pictured  as  an  ascending  scale  which  leads  up 
to  the  perfect  monad,  namely,  God.  God  is  the  one  per¬ 
fectly  organized  monad.  He  is  the  governing  monad,  and 
is  also  the  cause  of  the  existence  of  all  the  others. 

In  conceiving  of  the  relation  of  body  and  soul,  Leibnitz 


SPIRITUALISM  OR  IDEALISM 


249 


does  not  think  that  one  term  of  the  duality  sends  over  any 
influence  into  the  other  term.  Both  members  of  the  duality 
work  together  in  harmony.  There  is  in  Leibnitz’s  view, 
no  dead  matter  which  serves  in  Lockian  fashion  as  the  un¬ 
known  cause  of  our  perceptions.  On  this  point  Leibnitz 
is  in  fundamental  agreement  with  Aristotle.  The  soul  is 
the  entelechy  of  the  body. 

Leibnitz  has  propounded  an  original  conception  in  psy¬ 
chology,  to  wit,  the  conception  of  grades  of  consciousness. 
There  are  all  sorts  of  modes  of  awareness  ranging  from  the 
most  transient  and  evanescent  feelings  up  to  clear  self-con¬ 
sciousness.  The  inner  life  of  the  monad  is  made  up  of 
petit es  perceptions ,  minute  perceptions.  In  the  very  low¬ 
est  type  of  monads  there  are  but  few  of  these  minute  per¬ 
ceptions  and  the  unifying  principle  is  least  operative. 
Since  Leibnitz  conceives  all  force  as  being  in  the  final 
analysis  psychical,  the  physical  spatial  order  is  but  the 
phenomenal  expression  of  an  infinite  number  of  interre¬ 
lated  monads.  Force  is  of  the  nature  of  a  self-acting  and 
desiring  type.  I  am  a  body  governed  by  soul.  I  perceive 
most  clearly  those  monads  which  are  nearest  to  me  in  kind, 
and  I  also  perceive  their  interrelationships  under  the  form 
of  space.  The  world  is  a  harmonious  system  of  such 
monads,  and  these  monads  are  not  in  space,  but  space  is 
in  them.  The  same  relation  is  also  true  of  time.  The  laws 
of  mechanics  are  true,  but  they  are  not  the  ultimate  truth. 
The  Newtonian  principles  express  the  order  and  continuity 
between  spatial  phenomena.  From  the  spatial  point  of 
view,  the  world  is  through  and  through  mechanical,  but 
this  mechanical  system  is  the  expression  of  an  inner  pur¬ 
posive,  teleological  nature.  The  monads  constitute  a  king¬ 
dom  of  spirits,  a  cosmical  harmony  of  souls.  In  this  way 
Leibnitz  has  incorporated  into  a  single  principle  the  tele¬ 
ology  of  Plato  and  Aristotle,  and  the  mechanics  of  Newton, 
Kepler,  Galileo,  Huyghens,  et  al. 


250 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


Spiritualism  or  idealism  in  Leibnitz  thus  assumes  a 
form  which  does  not  deprive  nature  of  reality — nature  is 
real,  apart  from  our  minds.  Nature  is  really  alive,  is 
psychical,  and  in  this  respect  the  Leibnitzian  conception 
of  nature  is  in  perfect  harmony  with  the  nature-roman¬ 
ticism  of  Wordsworth,  Byron,  Shelley,  and  others.  In 
nature  there  is  an  all-pervasive  spirit  akin  to  ours.  Leib¬ 
nitz  is  also  in  harmony  with  the  most  recent  deliverances 
of  physical  science  ;  for  both  nature  is  dynamical,  is  process, 
activity. 

The  doctrine  of  Leibnitz  is  one  of  the  most  original 
metaphysical  conceptions  of  modern  times. 

This  type  of  spiritualism  does  not  really  account  for  the 
fact  that  the  world  of  our  experience  has  two  aspects. 
This  view  may  be  true,  but  it  fails  to  convince  us  that  the 
whole  of  nature  is  alive  and  psychical.  It  does  not  tell 
why  there  should  be  this  double  aspect  to  experience  and 
why,  if  physical  nature  really  consists  of  souls,  we  com¬ 
monly  fail  to  be  conscious  of  their  presence  and  are  usually 
incapable  of  communing  with  them.  Boyce,  our  late  notable 
American  idealist,  and  also  Liebmann,1  have  tried  to  rectify 
this  one  defect.  Royce  says  that  the  reason  why  we  do  not 
apprehend  the  psychical  life  of  nature  is  because  the  souls 
distributed  throughout  nature  have  different  time-spans. 
Our  own  consciousness  has  a  certain  beat,  so  to  speak ; 
attention  wavers  and  wanes  at  a  fairly  constant  rate.  Our 
consciousness  has  a  certain  rhythm.  If  we  had  a  more 
rapid  rhythm  of  consciousness,  we  might  live  in  a  minute 
as  much  as  we  now  live  in  a  hundred  years.  As  compared 
with  the  elephant  and  lower  forms  of  animal  organism,  and 
still  more  so  with  inorganic  nature,  our  consciousness  has 
a  much  more  rapid  rhythm.  Now  if  we  had  different 
rhythms  of  consciousness,  we  could  perhaps  hold  commu- 


1  In  Zur  Analysis  der  Wirklichkeit . 


SPIRITUALISM  OR  IDEALISM 


251 


nion  with  stars,  mountains,  trees,  yes,  even  with  stones. 
Our  failure  to  apprehend  the  all-pervading  psychical  life 
in  nature  is  thus,  according  to  Royce,  due  to  the  differences 
in  time-span  between  their  lives  and  ours. 

This  seems  unlikely  to  me.  If  all  parts  of  nature  have 
an  indwelling  consciousness,  then  our  scientific  formulas 
for  the  regular  behavior  of  objects  should  be  reducible  to  a 
common  type,  and  all  the  different  sciences  could  be  shown 
to  be  only  parts  of  one  science,  namely,  psychology.  Not 
only  logic  and  ethics,  but  physics  and  chemistry,  would  be 
merged  into  psychology.  As  science  develops,  we  discover 
that  the  rules  of  the  behavior  of  stones,  rivers,  and  clouds 
are  not  the  same  as  the  rules  of  the  behavior  of  psychical 
beings.  And,  among  psychical  beings,  those  with  the  most 
highly  organized  individuality  have  the  most  unique  and 
significant  ways  of  behaving.  Moreover,  we  also  discover 
that  the  difference  is  not  reducible  to  variations  in  the  time- 
span.  It  is  a  difference  in  kind.  There  is  a  constancy,  a 
regularity,  that  differs  in  kind  in  these  different  levels — 
namely,  the  physical,  the  animal,  and  the  rational — and  I 
fancy  that  the  time  is  not  even  relatively  at  hand  when 
the  only  technic  of  the  social  engineer  will  be  a  book  of  log 
tables  and  other  mathematical  formulae.  I  see  no  promise 
of  the  reduction  of  the  psychical  and  the  physical  to  a  com¬ 
mon  basis. 

III.  Objective  or  Absolute  Idealism 

Berkeley’s  Idealism  is  designated  subjective,  since  for 
him  only  subjects — God  and  finite  spirits,  human  and 
superhuman-— really  exist.  For  him  Reality  is  a  'plurality 
of  selves.  Physical  nature  exists  only  in  the  minds  of 
selves.  Leibnitz  differs  from  Berkeley  in  that  he  gives  to 
nature  a  quasi-independent  existence.  Nature  for  him 
consists  of  low  grade  centers  of  feeling  and  will.  Nature 


252 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


and  man  constitute  elements  in  a  harmonious  system. 
Their  existence  and  harmonious  working  together  is  con¬ 
stituted  by  God,  the  Governing  Monad.  Thus  for  Leibnitz 
nature  is  not,  as  it  is  for  Berkeley,  the  mere  effect  of  God’s 
direct  action  on  human  minds.  Nature  has  a  real  existence. 
More  recent  objective  idealism  does  not  regard  nature  as 
being  necessarily  an  assemblage  of  finite  souls.  Nature  is 
unconscious  mind.  It  does  not  exist  as  such  independent 
of  all  mind.  But  it  has  forces  and  ways  of  behaving  that 
are  different.  From  the  standpoint  of  objective  idealism 
the  physical  world  has  a  character  of  its  own.  In  fact,  it 
is  only  because  the  physical  is  ‘‘opposite”  to,  or  “other” 
than,  finite  mind  that  the  latter  can  realize  itself,  or  develop 
to  full  consciousness.  On  the  other  hand,  physical  nature 
and  finite  mind,  ultimately,  really  exist  only  as  elements  in 
the  unity  of  the  whole,  which  is  absolute  mind  or  spirit. 
Thus  the  unity  of  the  universe  is  that  of  one  self-active, 
self -developing,  self -expressing  being,  God  or  the  Absolute 
— which  differentiates  itself  endlessly  into  nature  and 
finite  mind,  but  which  never  loses  itself  in  the  processes  of 
the  finite  or  for  an  instant  ceases  to  be  any  less  a  unity. 
When  we  think  of  the  universe,  from  the  standpoint  of  its 
unity,  it  is  the  eternally  self-active,  self -differentiating 
One,  that  manifests  its  life  in  the  ceaseless  process  of  the 
finite — in  physical  attraction  and  repulsion,  in  the  play  of 
the  polarity  of  magnetism  and  electricity,  in  the  analytic 
and  synthetic  forces  of  chemism,  in  the  endless  or  circular 
process  of  self -reproduction,  self-development,  death  and 
birth  of  living  organisms,  in  the  ceaselessly  recurring  and 
yet  ever  progressing  conflicts  of  the  human  spirit  in  his¬ 
tory.  When  we  look  at  the  universe  from  the  standpoint  of 
any  finite  member  thereof,  whether  it  be  a  physical  atom, 
a  living  organism,  a  human  being,  a  nation’s  history,  or  the 
evolution  of  art  or  religion,  the  finite  member  in  question 
is  seen  to  find  its  being  in  process — in  attracting  and  re- 


SPIRITUALISM  OR  IDEALISM 


253 


pelling  other  atoms,  in  growing  and  dying,  and  thus  fur¬ 
thering  the  race  life,  in  realizing  its  destiny  or  making 
way  for  the  destiny  of  another  nation,  or  another  phase 
of  art  or  religion.  Thus  reality  is  at  once  a  self-differen¬ 
tiating  unity  and  a  struggling  and  conflicting  procession  of 
many  finite  and  transitory  elements.  The  key  to  the  inter¬ 
pretation  of  the  whole  of  reality,  as  having  these  two 
aspects  which  mutually  imply  one  another,  is  to  be  found 
in  the  nature  of  mind — not  in  the  mind  of  the  individual , 
as  he  thinks  himself  to  be,  but  the  racial  mind,  the  cosmic 
mind. 

The  names  of  chief  importance  in  the  development  of 
objective  idealism  are  J.  G.  Fichte,  who  took  the  first  step 
in  transforming  the  dualism  of  Kant  into  a  system  of 
objective  idealism;  Hegel,  who  developed  it,  with  sys¬ 
tematic  completeness,  into  a  rounded-out  system,  and  who 
applied  his  central  insight  to  all  spheres  of  existence,  to 
nature  and  the  social  order,  and  the  whole  of  man’s  cul¬ 
tural  history;  the  English  objective  or  absolute  idealists, 
T.  H.  Green,  E.  Caird,  F.  H.  Bradley  and  Bernard  Bosan- 
quet,  who  give  to  the  doctrine  a  freer  and  more  elastic 
form  than  it  has  in  Hegel’s  hands;  but  who,  in  funda¬ 
mentals,  represent  a  kindred  standpoint ;  and,  finally, 
Josiah  Royce,  in  wdiom  it  takes  a  decidedly  original  form. 

In  the  following  exposition  of  the  fundamental  stand¬ 
point  of  objective  idealism  I  shall  follow  Hegel  chiefly, 
only  noting  briefly  some  of  the  later  divergencies  from 
Hegel’s  standpoint.  The  present  exposition  of  objective 
idealism  cannot  be  understood  without  reference  to  Chap¬ 
ter  XXIV,  for  objective  idealism  is  essentially  a  singular  - 
istic  or  monistic  system.  Indeed  it  is  the  most  logical  form 
of  singularism. 

J.  G.  Fichte  was  an  enthusiastic  disciple  of  Kant.  But 
he  soon  became  dissatisfied  with  the  impassable  gulf  that 
yawned  in  Kant’s  system  between  the  world  of  phenomenal 


254 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


knowledge,  built  up  by  the  activity  of  the  pure  ego  out  of 
the  raw  materials  of  sensation,  and  the  unknown  wTorld  of 
the  Thing-in-itself,  the  realm  of  noumena,  forever  hidden 
behind  the  impenetrable  (by  any  scientific  thinking)  veil 
of  phenomena.  Kant  had  said  that  the  human  understand¬ 
ing,  by  its  analytic  and  synthetic  activity,  fashions  the  na¬ 
ture  known  to  science,  that  is,  the  realm  of  things  causally 
connected  into  a  system  in  the  space-time  world,  out  of 
the  materials  that  come  through  the  senses,  out  of  the 
ceaseless  stimulations  that  come  to  the  mind  through  the 
organs  of  sense  perception.  But  what  causes  these  sensa¬ 
tions  or  how  the  cause  is  related  in  character  to  the  human 
mind ,  Kant  said  we  cannot  know.  Fichte,  dissatisfied  with 
this  agnostic  dualism,  boldly  undertakes  to  show  why  there 
is  a  sense  world  or  physical  world.  He  says  that  there  are 
only  two  consistent  systems  of  philosophy,  dogmatism  or 
materialism  which  affirms  minds  to  be  products  of  things, 
and  idealism  which  affirms  things  to  be  products  of  minds. 
Either  one  or  the  other  system  is  true.  Neither  can  ex¬ 
plain  haw  that  which  it  takes  to  be  causally  dependent  is 
produced.  Idealism  cannot  explain  how  mind  produces 
matter.  Materialism  cannot  explain  how  matter  produces 
mind.  Still  less  can  it  explain  why  mind,  if  the  by-product 
of  matter,  should  be  self-conscious. 

Fichte  holds  that  a  man’s  philosophy  is  the  expression 
of  his  character.  One  wrho  has  a  sense  of  man’s  moral 
worth  and  spiritual  freedom  will  choose  idealism.  One 
who,  with  the  “ pigsty  philosophy”  of  hedonism,  regards 
man  as  merely  an  animal,  will  accept  materialism. 

Fichte  chooses  idealism  on  grounds  of  moral  insight  and 
faith.  Then  he  proceeds  to  explain  why,  if  idealism  be 
true,  there  should  be  a  sense  realm  at  all.  (Note  that  he 
explains  why,  not  how,  the  world  of  the  senses  comes  into 
being).  His  standpoint  is  teleological  and  moralistic,  not 
causal  in  the  scientific  sense  at  all.  The  explanation  is  as 


SPIRITUALISM  OR  IDEALISM 


follows.  The  finite  moral  will,  in  order  that  it  may  develop 
into  a  fully  conscious,  rational  self-determining  will  or  ego, 
must  be  confronted  by  an  opposite  or  other ,  which  chal¬ 
lenges  it  and  stimulates  it  to  free  self -activity.  The  ra¬ 
tional  or  spiritual  life  of  man  can  be  developed  only  in 
conflict  with,  and  in  the  overcoming  of,  the  physical. 
Nature ,  the  realm  of  the  sensuous  or  material  in  experience, 
is  that  apparent  other -than-mind,  in  the  conquest  of  which 
mind  comes  into  conscious  self-possession. 

Nature  is  the  sensuous  material  for  the  fulfillment  of 
man’s  moral  vocation.  This  vocation,  in  turn,  consists  of 
free,  rational  self -activity.  The  individual  wins  his  free¬ 
dom  through  control  of  his  sensuous  impulses.  The  race 
wins  its  freedom  and  finds  its  vocation  in  subduing  nature 
to  cultural  or  spiritual  ends.  Thus  the  opposition  between 
nature  and  reason  is  set  up  in  order  that  in  every  finite 
self  and,  therefore,  in  the  whole  of  the  human  race,  reason 
may  develop  from  unconscious  latency  to  rational-self¬ 
consciousness.  The  eternal  meaning  of  the  universe  is  that 
there  shall  be  a  world  of  rational  selves,  hence  the  opposi¬ 
tion  between  self  and  nature,  ego  and  non-ego,  is  set  up 
( posited  is  Fichte’s  term)  by  the  universal  or  cosmic  will, 
in  order  that  there  may  be  an  ever  developing  world  of 
finite  wills  which  shall  express  his  being.  Reason’s  world, 
the  world  of  the  cosmic  will,  is  an  infinity  of  self -produc¬ 
tion.  All  finite  willing  is  to  realize  the  infinite  will,  the 
universal  ego,  which  is  infinite  activity.  There  is  no  real 
world  but  will.  There  is  no  destiny  but  the  ceaseless  self- 
realization  of  rational  will  by  finite  selves,  as  organs  of  the 
world  will,  as  sparks  of  the  world  reason. 

The  moral  vocation  of  man  is  the  supreme  clue  to  the 
meaning  of  reality.  This  moral  vocation  involves  a  dialec¬ 
tical  or  triadic  process.  First,  is  the  universal  will  or  ego. 
Second,  in  order  that  the  universal  ego  may  come  to  con¬ 
sciousness  in  a  world  of  finite  egos,  there  must  be  set  up. 


256  THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 

by  the  universal  will,  a  non-ego,  an  opposite  which  is  na¬ 
ture,  the  sense  world.  Third,  is  the  process  of  overcoming 
the  opposition,  in  which  process  the  finite  ego  wins  rational 
freedom  and  becomes  a  conscious  member  of  the  universal 
moral  world  order.  The  triadic  process,  thesis-antithesis- 
synthesis,  is  the  essential  or  true  process  of  mind  or  spirit. 

Hegel  takes  up  this  basic  insight  of  Fichte’s  and  works 
it  out,  with  unwearied  assiduity,  profound  insight  and  com¬ 
prehensive  knowledge  and  great  synthetic  power,  in  all 
aspects  of  existence.  Later  forms  of  objective  idealism  are 
chiefly  commentaries  on,  or  emendations  of,  Hegel. 

In  the  following  exposition  of  Hegel’s  doctrine  I  shall 
pass  lightly  over  Hegel’s  philosophy  of  nature,  as  being 
the  least  interesting  and  least  fortunate  part  of  his  system. 
Hegel  works  out  the  principles  of  absolute  or  objective 
idealism  in  all  directions.  His  is  a  system  of  evolutionistic 
or  dynamic  idealism,  into  which  is  woven  the  whole  content 
of  the  historical  life  of  the  human  species.  Reality  is 
process,  and  process  is  essentially  spirit  or  mind.  Human 
history  is  the  progressive  expression  of  the  supreme  spirit, 
reason  or  purpose.  He  holds  that  the  starting  point  for 
philosophical  interpretation  is  experience,  but  says  that, 
in  interpreting  experience,  everything  depends  on  the  mind 
we  bring  to  the  task.  Experience,  in  its  true  character,  is 
a  logically  articulated  system,  not  a  heap  or  disconnected 
sequence  of  isolated  particular  facts.  The  scientific  devel¬ 
opment  of  this  system  is  the  task  of  logic  which,  for  Hegel, 
is  identical  with  metaphysics,  or  theory  of  reality :  ‘  ‘  The 
science  of  things  set  and  held  in  pure  thought.  Logic  de¬ 
velops  the  system  of  the  pure  types  of  thought,  not  of  the 
individual’s  thought  but  of  universal  objective  thought, 
the  world  reason.”  Applied  philosophy  consists  of  two 
parts:  (1)  Philosophy  of  nature,  which  traces  out  the 
stages  in  the  materialization  or  concretion  of  thought  un¬ 
consciously  operative  in  physical  nature;  mind  alienated 


SPIRITUALISM  OR  IDEALISM 


257 


from  itself;  (2)  philosophy  of  mind,  which  traces  out  the 
stages  in  the  ever  increasing  coming-to-more-adequate- 
consciousness  of  the  universal  reason  in  human  thought 
and  social  culture.  Philosophy  of  mind  has  three  divi¬ 
sions:  (1)  Philosophy  of  subjective  mind,  the  science  of 
the  individual  mind  operating  in  the  bodily  organism 
(anthropology  and  psychology)  ;  (2)  philosophy  of  ob¬ 
jective  mind,  the  science  of  the  mind  as  it  objectifies  itself 
in  the  social  institutions  of  family,  law,  property,  economic, 
civil,  and  political  life ;  it  is  through  social  institutions  that 
the  individual  mind  becomes  moralized  and  rationalized, 
in  short,  attains  personality;  (3)  absolute  mind.  In  art, 
religion,  and  philosophy,  human  mind  attains  a  higher  and 
more  adequate  consciousness  of  itself  as  the  organ  of  the 
absolute  mind,  and  of  the  identity  of  itself  with  the  abso¬ 
lute  mind,  than  it  is  able  to  reach  in  social  life.  Thus  the 
final  and  highest  task  of  philosophy  is  to  interpret  the 
meanings  of  art  and  religion  for  the  self-realization  of 
Spirit.2 

For  Hegel  the  true  is  the  whole.  Truth  is  the  self -com¬ 
prehension  of  reality.  When  we  say  “true”  we  are  think¬ 
ing  of  that  which  is  comprehended,  that  is  of  the  contents 
of  thought.  Hence  the  test  of  truth  for  him  is  not  agree¬ 
ment  of  thought  with  anything  independent  of  thought. 
Truth  is  the  agreement  or  coherence  of  thought  with 
thought.  The  absolute  truth  is  the  self-consistent  totality 
of  truth.  The  absolute  reality  is  the  self-coherent  whole  of 
being.  Absolute  reality  is  the  perfectly  harmonious  order 
or  system  which  is  at  once  subject  and  object,  Knowing  that 
knows  itself.  (How  reminiscent  this  is  of  Aristotle!)  The 
utterly  coherent  or  harmonious  cosmical  order,  which  is  the 
absolute  mind,  is  a  living  process;  it  contains  within  itself 
the  whole  endless  variety  of  finite  events.  It  includes,  and 

2  The  word  that  Hegel  uses  for  mind  is  Geist,  which  means  spirit 
or  mind. 


258 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


ever  subdues  into  its  eternal  harmony,  all  the  clashes  of 
physical  forces,  all  the  conflicts  of  history,  all  the  striving 
and  suffering  of  human  life.  It  is  eternal  calm  in  the 
midst  of  the  world  storms,  eternal  harmony  that  runs 
through  all  the  cosmical  discords.  The  untrue,  the  bad, 
the  transitory,  is  that  which  is  discordant,  that  which  is 
at  war  with  itself  and  is,  therefore,  forever  passing  over 
into  something  other  than  itself.  But  the  untrue,  the  bad, 
the  apparent,  the  transitory,  is  ever  being  transmuted 
or  transfigured  into  content  of  the  true,  the  good,  the 
real,  the  eternal.  The  one  in  the  many,  the  infinite  in  the 
finite,  the  absolute  in  the  relative,  the  real  in  the  apparent 
— such,  according  to  Hegel,  is  the  final  insight  attained 
by  speculative  philosophy.  Such  he  thinks  is  the  true 
meaning  of  mysticism.  Hegel’s  philosophy  is  a  system 
of  speculative  mysticism,  worked  out  with  extraordinary 
industry,  knowledge  and  insight,  in  application  to  all 
spheres  of  human  life.  Nowhere  else  in  ihe  history  of 
Western  philosophy  does  one  find  such  a  blending  of 
mystical  vision  with  logical  vigor  and  wealth  of  concrete 
knowledge  of  man’s  cultural  history  as  in  Hegel. 

The  paradoxical  union  of  opposites  is  achieved  by  the 
dialectic  method.  We  have  seen  that  Hegel  was  indebted 
to  Fichte  for  the  suggestion  of  his  method.  But  he  was 
also  much  influenced  by  Plato ’s  use  of  dialectic,  espe¬ 
cially  in  the  Parmenides  and  Sophist. 

Reason ,  says  Hegel,  is  the  faculty  of  true  speculative 
knowledge,  the  understanding  only  sets  up  oppositions.  It 
is  the  reason  which  overcomes  them  by  showing  that  they 
are  united  in  a  higher  synthesis.  Kant  had  argued  in  his 
antinomies  that,  on  equally  cogent  grounds,  one  must 
affirm  and  deny  that  the  world  in  time  and  space  is  finite 
and  infinite,  is  and  is  not  made  up  of  simple  parts,  and  that 
there  is  and  there  is  not  freedom  and  a  self -existent  and 
free  first  cause.  Kant  could  find  no  solution  for  this  con- 


SPIRITUALISM  OR  IDEALISM 


259 


flict  of  reason  with  itself  but  to  deny'  that  time  and  space 
were  ultimately  real.  Hegel  thinks  the  statement  of  the 
antinomies  the  best  thing  in  Kant’s  philosophy,  but  he 
holds  that  Kant  failed  to  find  the  right  solution  which 
is  this:  “The  true  and  positive  meaning  of  the  antinomies 
is  that  every  actual  thing  involves  a  coexistence  of  opposed 
elements.  Consequently  to  know,  or  in  other  words,  to 
comprehend  an  object  is  equivalent  to  being  conscious 
of  it  as  a  concrete  unity  of  opposed  determinations.” 
(Wallace,  The  Logic  of  Hegel ,  p.  100.)  Thus  “by  dia¬ 
lectic  is  meant  the  indwelling  tendency  outwards  by  which 
the  one-sidedness  and  limitations  of  the  predicates  of 
understanding  is  seen  in  its  true  light.”  (Op.  cit.,  p.  147.) 
“For  anything  to  be  finite  is  just  to  suppress  itself  and 
to  put  itself  aside.  Thus  understood,  the  dialectical  prin¬ 
ciple  constitutes  the  life  and  soul  of  scientific  progress, 
the  dynamic  which  alone  gives  immanent  connection  and 
necessity  to  the  body  of  science.” 

“When  we  look  more  closely,  we  find  that  the  limita¬ 
tions  of  the  finite  do  not  merelv  come  from  without ;  that 
its  own  nature  is  the  cause  of  its  abrogation  and  that  by 
its  own  act  it  passes  into  its  counterpart.”  (Op.  cit., 
p.  148.) 

Man  is  mortal  means  not  external  circumstances  cause 
death  but  life,  as  life,  involves  the  germ  of  death ;  ‘  ‘  every¬ 
thing  finite,  instead  of  being  stable  and  ultimate,  is  rather 
changeable  and  transient  and  this  is  exactly  what  we  mean 
by  that  dialectic  of  the  finite  by  which  the  finite,  as  im¬ 
plicitly  other  than  what  it  is,  is  forced  beyond  its  own 
immediate  or  natural  being  to  turn  suddenly  into  its 
opposite.”  (Op.  cit.,  p.  150.) 

Thus  everything  finite,  from  the  humblest  sense  object 
to  the  greatest  man  or  nation,  implies  always  an  “other” 
or  “different”  on  which  its  meaning  and  very  being  de¬ 
pend.  For  every  being  is  specific  or  individual.  Mere 


260 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


being,  undefined  being,  is  the  same  as  nothing.  To  be  is 
to  be  something  and  hence  not  to  be  some  other  thing. 
Everything  concrete  is  a  unity  of  differents  or  opposites. 
Let  us  take  an  orange.  We  say  an  orange  is  a  yellow 
spheroid  with  a  rough  skin  and  a  soft  interior  with  an 
acid  juice.  But  yellow  is  not  spheroidal,  rough  is  not 
yellow,  softness  is  not  acidity  and  juiciness  is  not  acidity. 
So  on  we  might  go.  The  orange  is  a  unity  of  differents 
or  distincts .3  Moreover,  an  orange  is  not  any  other  finite 
object.  There  are  on  my  desk  paper,  inkstand,  books,  pipe, 
pens,  pencils.  No  one  of  these  things  is  any  other,  and 
yet  any  one  is  definable  and  can  exist  only  in  relation  to 
the  others.  Let  us  take,  says  Hegel,  the  spiritual  world  and 
we  shall  find  everywhere  illustrations  of  the  dialectic. 
“Pride  goeth  before  a  fall.”  “Vaulting  ambition  o’er 
leaps  itself  and  falls  on  the  other  side.”  “Too  much  wit 
outwits  itself.”  “Push  a  right  to  an  extreme  and  it  be¬ 
comes  a  wrong  ’  ’ ;  for  example,  Shylock  and  his  pound  of 
flesh.  Men  cannot  live  without  one  another  or  peacefully 
with  one  another.  Thus,  as  Kant  said,  the  chief  cause 
of  society  is  man’s  unsocial  sociableness. 


3  Hegel’s  Logic  is  not  free  from  the  confusion  between  predicates 
that  are  differents,  and  predicates  that  are  opposites  in  the  sense 
that  they  are  incompatible  and,  hence,  to  attribute  them  to  the 
same  subject  is  to  do  violence  to  the  nature  of  experience  and 
thought.  There  is  no  contradiction  between  an  orange  being  both 
yellow  and  round  at  the  same  moment,  but  there  is  a  contradiction 
between  its  being  both  yellowT  and  not  yellow,  for  example,  green, 
at  the  same  moment.  Hegel,  in  his  arguments  on  the  “othering” 
process,  has  two  aims  in  mind,  which  he  does  not  always  keep  dis¬ 
tinct.  One  of  these  is  to  show  that  reality  is  a  concrete  whole  of 
interrelated  elements;  the  other  is  to  show  that  reality  is  a  living 
process  and  that,  therefore,  things  are  incessantly  passing  beyond 
themselves  into  their  opposites,  or  becoming  other  than  they  first 
appear  to  be,  for  example,  life  into  death  and  death  into  life,  one 
generation  into  another,  body  becoming  individual  mind  and  indi¬ 
vidual  mind  becoming  socialized,  God  becoming  Man  and  Man  be¬ 
coming  divine,  etc.  The  power  of  negation  or  contradiction,  of 
which  Hegel  is  so  fond  of  talking,  is  the  nerve  of  the  latter  or 
dialectic  process.  See  Hegel,  Logic,  translated  by  Wallace,  and 
B.  Croce,  What  is  Living  and  What  is  Dead  in  Hegel's  Philosophy. 


SPIRITUALISM  OR  IDEALISM 


261 


Reasonableness,  says  Hegel,  consists  just  in  embrac¬ 
ing  these  opposites  as  mi  substantial  elements  in  the  concrete 
unity  of  the  whole  system  of  reality. 

Heraclitus  said:  “All  Being  is  becoming/ ’  This,  says 
Hegel,  means  that  Hamlet’s  question  “to  he  or  not  to  be” 
is  posed  at  the  level  of  the  mere  understanding.  The  truth 
is  that  to  be  is  not  to  be,  and  not  to  be  is  to  be ;  for  all  life 
and  mind  are  process,  a  passing  from  one  stage  of  being 
to  another.  In  any  and  every  such  transition,  if  the  earlier 
stage  is  taken  as  being,  in  relation  to  that  the  later  stage 
is  nonbeing,  and,  if  the  later  stage  is  taken  as  being,  the 
earlier  stage  is  nonbeing  in  relation  to  that.  But  the  true 
insight  is  that  being  consists  just  in  the  continuous  transi¬ 
tion  from  one  form  of  finitude  to  another.  Everything  finite 
is  relative,  transitional,  in  process  and  the  infinite  is  the 
totality  of  the  process,  the  absolute  is  the  total  system  of 
the  relative. 

Hence,  says  Hegel,  it  is  a  superficial  and  indeed  a  false 
philosophy  which  makes  such  assertions  as  these:  “We 
know  only  appearance ;  the  essence  of  reality  is  hidden  and 
unknowable.”  “We  do  not  know  what  force  really  is,  we 
know  only  its  manifestations.”  “We  do  not  know  what 
electricity  or  life  are;  we  know  only  their  phenomena.” 
“We  do  not  know  true  causes,  but  only  apparent  effects.” 
The  essence  is  simply  the  whole  system  of  appearances. 
The  noumenon  is  the  systematic  totality  of  phenomena. 
Force,  electricity,  life,  are  what  they  do.  Causes  are  causes 
only  in  relation  to  effects.  So,  too,  savs  Hegel,  to  make  God 
a  being  beyond  the  stars  and  inaccessible  is  to  make  him 
nothing,  a  mere  abstract  essence,  a  mere  name  with  three 
letters.  God  is  what  he  appears  to  be.  He  is  essentially  the 
being  who  manifests  himself,  and  the  whole  world  is  his 
coni i n u ing  manifestation. 

Thus  far  one  might  suppose  Hegel’s  view  identical  with 
Hindu  pantheism  or  that  of  Pope, 


262 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


All  are  but  parts  of  one  stupendous  whole 
Whose  body  nature  is,  and  God  the  soul. 

But  Hegel’s  doctrine  is  much  more  profound.  God,  the 
absolute  mind,  is  nothing  apart  from  the  universe.  He 
is  the  unity,  the  coherent  totality  of  which  all  finite  forms 
and  events  are  manifestations.  In  him  these  live  and 
move  and  have  their  being,  and  through  these  he  lives 
and  moves  and  has  his  being ;  but  not  all  appearances  are 
on  the  same  level.  The  dialectic  process  of  reality  is  an 
ascent,  from  physical  movements  of  attraction  and  repul¬ 
sion,  through  living  organisms  and  species,  to  mind’s  or 
spirit’s  summit  of  self -comprehension  in  art,  religion,  and 
philosophy.  One  star  differeth  from  another  in  glory,  and 
just  so  one  finite  form  differeth  from  another  in  the  degree 
of  its  adequacy  of  manifestation  of  divinity  or  of  reality. 

There  are  three  chief  stages  in  the  process : 

1.  Being-f or -another .  In  the  physical  world  all  things 
exist  only  in  relation :  for  example,  a  thing  and  its  prop¬ 
erties,  negative  and  positive  electricity,  the  acid  and  the 
base,  cause  and  effect.  But  until  conscious  life  is  reached, 
everything  seems  only  to  have  being  for  another,  that  is, 
it  can  exist  and  be  defined  only  in  relation  to  another 
which  is  external  to  it.  It  is  not  a  self-determining  center 
of  being  and  action.  It  has  no  inner  life,  no  power  of 
return  into  itself.  The  significance  of  things  physical, 
existing  side  by  side  in  space  and  following  one  another 
in  temporal  succession,  is  exhausted  in  their  external  rela¬ 
tions.  Nature,  indeed,  has  neither  kernel  nor  husk.  She 
is  both  at  once.  But  nature  seems  to  flow  on  endlessly 
without  achieving  any  inner  self-possession. 

2.  Being-in-itself.  In  conscious  life  we  have  a  phase 
of  existence  that  indeed  depends  upon  the  other,  but  also 
has  a  self -returning,  self -possessing  unity.  Living  organ¬ 
isms  are  not  exhausted  in  their  external  relations.  Life 


SPIRITUALISM  OR  IDEALISM 


263 


maintains  itself,  enhances  itself,  reproduces  itself.  The 
individual  is  prolonged  and  perhaps  enhanced  in  the  life 
of  the  species. 

Thus  individuality,  as  the  centralizing  operative  power 
of  relationship,  appears.  Still  the  individual  organism  is 
dependent  on  another,  and  is  but  a  link  in  the  endless 
chain  of  the  life  of  the  species  which,  since  it  is  an  endless 
procession,  nowhere  enables  the  principle  of  individuality 
to  be  fully  realized.  “Life,”  says  Hegel,  “is  the  Idea 
(or  mind)  which  has  not  yet  realized  its  true  purpose.” 
(Op.  cit.,  255.) 

3.  Being-in-and-for-itself.  It  is  first  in  self-conscious  or 
rational  individuality  that  the  true  purpose  of  the  dialectic 
process  is  achieved.  By  this  Hegel  means  the  individuality 
that  goes  out  into  and  lives  in  all  the  relations  which  con¬ 
stitute  the  world,  but  which,  in  that  ceaseless  out-going, 
realizes  itself  as  the  central  and  conscious  focus  of  these 
relations.  Thus  the  true  individual  is  an  organized  rational 
unity,  a  svstem  of  elements  existing  in  conscious  relations. 
The  mechanical  view  of  reality  is  inadequate,  because  it 
gives  no  real  unity,  only  an  external  juxtaposition  of  parts 
related  in  space.  The  organism  is  higher,  but  single  or¬ 
ganisms  are  the  prey  of  the  environment,  and  the  species 
is  a  mere  succession  of  living  individuals.  The  true  whole, 
the  true  reality,  is  a  self-differentiating  unity,  a  self- 
unifying  plurality.  It  is  the  absolute  Spirit  operative  in 
nature  (blindly)  and  coming  to  ever  fuller  self-conscious¬ 
ness  in  Humanity. 

From  the  standpoint  of  the  unity,  reality  is  the  eternal 
ground  of  the  endless  procession  of  spirits.  From  the 
standpoint  of  the  plurality,  reality  is  the  society  of  selves 
realizing  in  time  its  unity  with  the  eternal  ground.  The 
absolute  is  the  universal  spirit  that  lives  and  moves  in  the 
whole  system  of  finite  spirits.  He  is  the  perfect  self  or 
ego  who  lives  in  and  through  all  imperfect  selves. 


264 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


Hegel  is  very  emphatic  in  his  expressions  as  to  the 
supremacy  of  selfhood.  He  says  that  Kant’s  criticism, 
which  denies  that  we  can  know  the  self,  takes  the  self  as 
a  mere  abstract  essence.  It  is  objected  that  in  order  that 
the  ego  may  know  itself  it  must  make  itself  object  and 
that  this  is  a  circle.  Hegel  remarks  that  it  is  true  that  if 
one  thinks  a  stone  is  a  stone,  the  stone  does  not  stand  in 
the  way.  But  surely,  he  remarks,  this  does  not  mean  that 
a  stone  is  superior  to  a  self,  because  it  has  no  self-con¬ 
sciousness  to  stand  in  the  way  of  its  being  thought  by 
another.  He  affirms  that  it  is  the  very  nature  of  the 
ego  or  self  to  be  subject-object.  “In  thinking  itself  the 
absolute,  eternal  nature  and  notion  of  selfhood  is  re¬ 
vealed  in  the  immediate  empirical  consciousness,  since 
self-consciousness  is  precisely  the  existing  and  therefore 
empirically  perceivable  pure  notion,  the  absolutely  self- 
relating,  which  as  distinguishing  or  separating  judgment 
makes  itself  its  own  object  and  thus  alone  is  able  to  con¬ 
stitute  a  circle,  that  is  of  knowing  and  known  in  one.” 
The  concrete  self  or  ego  is  subject-object.  It  is  that 
which  moves  and  lives  and  knows  itself  in  differences 
or  otherness.  The  single  living  individual  lives  and  knows 
himself  through  the  species,  and  the  species  lives  through 
being  transformed  into  spirit.  The  unitary  and  eternal 
ground  of  the  whole  process  is  the  absolute  spirit:  the 
absolute  all-inclusive  individual.  For  Hegel  the  indi¬ 
vidual,  the  concrete  self  is  real,  but  there  is  only  one 
absolutely  real  individu-al — God.  God  is  the  eternally 
realized  absolute  idea  or  purpose,  the  perfect  individual 
or  personality.  He  is  the  absolute  spirit,  in  whom  finite 
spirits  live  and  move  and  have  their  being.  In  terms  of 
feeling,  God  may  be  defined  as  Love,  as  a  play  of  differ¬ 
entiation,  together  with  the  consciousness  of  the  unity 
which  dwells  in  the  differences.  God  is  the  universal 
self-consciousness  which  comprehends  within  itself  all 


SPIRITUALISM  OR  IDEALISM 


265 


concrete  differences.  He  is  the  unity  of  spirits.  The 
society  of  finite  spirits  exists  as  the  object  of  his  thought. 
In  him  the  scattered  rays  of  light,  which  form  the  multi¬ 
tude  of  finite  selves,  converge  to  a  single  point — to  the 
unstained  purity  and  translucence  of  an  absolute  self- 
consciousness. 

It  has  been  maintained  that  God  or  the  Absolute,  for 
Hegel,  is  simply  the  impersonal  unity  of  a  perfect  society 
or  community  of  selves.4  I  have  not  space  to  discuss 
this  view  fully  here.  Hegel  frequently  refers  to  the 
absolute  as  an  individual,  nay  the  individual.  We  have 
just  seen  the  high  estimate  he  places  on  selfhood  as  at 
once  subject  and  object.  Again  he  says,  speaking  of  the 
dialectic  process  or  activity  of  selfhood,  “  Every  new  step 
in  the  going-outside-itself,  that  is,  in  the  farther  deter¬ 
mination,  is  also  a  return-into-self ;  the  wider  extension, 
is  at  the  same  time,  the  higher  intensity.  The  richest  is 
the  most  concrete  and  subjective,  and  the  mightiest  and 
most  comprehensive  which  goes  back  into  its  own  simplest 
depth.  The  highest,  extremest  summit  is  pure  personality 
which  alone,  through  the  absolute  dialectic,  which  is  in 
its  nature,  grasps  and  encloses  everything  in  itself — since 
it  makes  itself  the  freest — makes  itself  the  Simplicity  which 
is  the  first  Immediacy  and  Universality. ’ ’  (Hegel,  Werke, 
V,  p.  339.) 

In  short,  God,  for  Hegel,  is  the  conscious  unity  which 
lives  and  acts,  thinks  and  feels,  in  and  through  the  whole 
system  of  finite  being.  He  is  the  unity  of  subject  and 
object,  the  living  one  in  and  through  which  the  many 
have  their  being.  As  the  unitary  totality  of  all  related 
beings  he  is  the  absolute.  He  is  the  universal  all-including, 
all-sustaining  self-of -selves. 

Thus  far  we  have  been  outlining  Hegel’s  conception  of 

4  For  example  by  Mr.  J.  M.  E.  McTaggart.  See  his  Studies  in 
Hegelian  Dialectic  and  Studies  in  Hegelian  Cosmology. 


266 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


reality,  and  indicating  how  he  reached  it.  We  have  seen 
that  he  regards  everything  finite  and  transitory  as  a  phase 
of  the  eternal  self -manifestation  of  the  Absolute  Self  or 
Spirit.  This  spirit  is  dynamically  and  progressive^  im¬ 
manent  in  the  works  of  nature  and  the  whole  political  and 
cultural  or  social  life  of  man.  But  this  absolute  Spirit, 
as  the  eternal  ground  of  the  finite,  transcends  nature  and 
human  history.  Man’s  highest  knowledges  of  him  are 
attained  through  art,  religion,  and  philosophical  specula¬ 
tion.  (Like  many  other  features  of  Hegel’s  doctrine  this 
is  reminiscent  of  Plato  and  Aristotle.) 

Hegel  carries  out  his  fundamental  insight  by  tracing  out 
the  evolution  of  human  culture ;  that  is  of  art,  religion, 
political  history,  and  philosophy  as,  from  one  side,  aspects 
in  the  progressive  self-manifestation  in  time  of  the  Abso¬ 
lute  Spirit  and,  from  the  other  side,  the  progressive  self- 
realization  by  humanity  of  its  spiritual  destiny  through 
the  growth  in  self-conscious  possession  of  reason,  beauty, 
social  order,  and  individual  freedom  and  unitv  with  God. 
It  is  beyond  the  scope  of  this  introduction  to  outline  these. 
The  beginner  in  the  study  of  objective  idealism  will  prob¬ 
ably  profit  most  by  studying  this  aspect  of  Hegel’s  work.  In 
fact  his  philosophy  of  history  is  probably  the  best  introduc¬ 
tion  to  the  study  of  his  system.  I  shall  have  occasion  to 
refer  to  some  of  these  parts  of  Hegel’s  Philosophy  in  later 
chapters.  (Cf.,  especially  Chapter  XXVIII.) 

The  reader  will  find  it  interesting  and  profitable  to  compare 
the  dialectic  method  of  modern  idealism,  especially  Fichte  and 
Hegel,  with  the  dialectic  of  Zeno  the  Eleatic,  and  of  Plato.  Zeno’s 
aim  appears  to  have  been  purely  negative — to  refute  the  common 
assumption  of  the  reality  of  motion,  number  and  multiplicity  in 
things,  by  showing  that  those  who  make  such  assumptions  fall 
into  hopeless  contradictions.  Thus  the  belief  in  motion,  change 
and  multiplicity  is  reduced  to  a  logical  absurdity.  The  dialectic 
of  Plato  has  a  positive,  as  well  as  a  negative,  purport.  Plato 
aims,  (1)  to  refute  the  dogmatic  assumptions  of  common  opinion 


SPIRITUALISM  OR  IDEALISM 


267 


and,  more  especially,  of  the  Sophists,  by  showing  up  their  inher¬ 
ently  self -contradictory  character;  (2)  to  lead  the  mind  of  his 
hearers  and  readers  up,  from  the  unreflecting  status  of  persons 
in  whose  minds  a  heterogeneous  collection  of  unexamined  and 
unrelated  beliefs  find  lodgment,  to  an  insight  into  the  rational 
and  systematic  or  “ideal”  structure  of  reality.  To  this  end 
Plato  sets  out  from  many  different  points  of  departure  in  com¬ 
mon  “opinion,”  from  ordinary  views  concerning  moral  qualities, 
aesthetic  qualities,  natural  and  artificial  kinds  or  classes,  mathe¬ 
matical  relationships.  Hegel’s  aim,  in  his  dialectic,  seems  to  be 
the  same  as  Plato’s ;  there  is,  however,  this  fundamental  difference 
— whereas,  for  Hegel,  the  dialectic  process  is  the  moving  spring 
of  reality  itself,  since  reality  is  spirit  and  spirit  lives  and  func¬ 
tions  in  the  process  itself,  Plato  does  not  seem  to  admit  that 
reality,  in  its  total  truth  and  nature,  is  a  process  that  is  forever 
transcending  itself  and  returning  to  itself.  Plato’s  insight  into 
the  nature  of  spirit  is  not  so  profound  as  that  of  Hegel,  who  had 
behind  him  the  results  of  nearly  eighteen  centuries  of  Western 
civilization  impregnated  with  Christianity.  Plato,  I  think,  taught 
that  true  reality  is  spirit  and  that  spirit  is  one-in-many.  He  did 
glimpse  the  dynamic  and  dialectic  character  of  spirit,  but  he  failed 
to  see  clearly  the  consequence  that,  from  his  premises,  spirit 
must  be  the  immanent  dynamic  activity  of  the  whole  of  being. 
He  does  say  that  Ideas  are  powers,  but  he  does  not  see  that,  if 
this  be  so,  Ideas  must  be  functions  or  phases  of  personality. 
Plato  does  not  plumb  the  full  depths  of  personality  or  spiritual 
selfhood,  and,  therefore,  there  remains  a  dualism  for  him  between 
the  Ideal  and  the  Actual.  Hegel  boldly  says  that  this  dualism  is 
a  moment  in  the  eternal  process  of  spiritual  self-realization. 
'Whether  we  agree  with  his  interpretation  of  reality  or  not,  we 
must  admit  that  it  was  he  who  has  most  nearly  sounded  the  full 
depths  of  the  philosophy  of  spirit.  I  do  not  mean  that  Hegel 
was  infallible,  nor  that  tnere  is  nothing  more  to  be  done  in  the 
interpretation  of  personality.  I  mean  that  he  sketched  the  main 
outlines.  In  this  sense  all  objective  idealism,  every  interpretation 
of  reality  in  terms  of  spirit,  must  follow  in  his  path,  though  not 
in  every  one  of  his  footsteps. 

The  most  important  recent  statements  of  objective 
idealism  are  those  of  F.  II.  Bradley  and  B.  Bosanquet  in 
England,  and  Josiah  Royce  in  America. 


268 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


Mr.  Bradley’s  Appearance  and  Reality  (2nd  Edition)  is  the 
most  brilliant  and  incisive  piece  of  metaphysical  writing  in  Eng¬ 
lish  that  has  appeared  since  Hume.  He  shows  a  quite  extraor¬ 
dinary  power  of  putting  subtle  dialectical  argumentation  into 
clear  English.  Here  I  shall  only  state  briefly  wherein  he  seems 
to  modify  the  Hegelian  statement  of  absolute  idealism.  The 
criticism  most  frequently  directed  at  Hegel  is  that  he  reduced  the 
whole  of  nature  and  human  experience  and  life  to  a  cobweb  spun 
by  pure  thought.  It  is  charged  that  his  absolute  is  the  hyposta- 
tisation  of  pure  thought ,  and  that  he  is  one-sidedly  intellectual- 
istic  or  panlogistic,  ignoring  the  dominant  part  played  by  will 
and  feeling  in  human  life.  As  a  consequence  of  this  vice,  it  is 
said,  Hegel  attempts  to  reduce  nature,  history,  and  human  life  to 
a  network  or  mesh  of  logical  relations  spun  out  by  the  spiderlike 
intellect  of  the  Absolute.  I  do  not  regard  these  criticisms  as 
wholly  justified.  Hegel’s  Thought,  Idea,  or  Notion  (Begriff) 
includes  feeling  cultivated  by  the  reason,  and  will  as  rational 
activity.  But  there  is  some  measure  of  justification  in  the  criti¬ 
cisms — just  how  much  is  beyond  the  scope  of  this  work  to 
determine.  Mr.  Bradley  holds  that  thought  necessarily  involves 
duality — the  distinction  between  thinking  or  knowing  and  its 
objects;  and  that  volition  involves  a  similar  duality — the  con¬ 
trast  between  purpose  or  striving  and  the  ends  or  objects  thereof. 
The  same  duality  infects  the  entire  lives  of  selves  or  persons. 
One  can  think  a  self  only  in  relation  to  that  which  is  not-itself. 
The  absolute  unity  cannot  then  be  thought,  volition,  or  even  a 
self.  It  must  transcend  the  oppositions  or  dualisms  by  which 
these  are  necessarily  beset.  An  immediate  experience,  analogous 
to  love  or  aesthetic  feeling,  an  experience  in  which  thought,  desire, 
and  will  are  all  taken  up  and  transmuted  into  a  perfect,  har¬ 
monious  and  stable  unity  of  feeling,  is  the  Absolute.  The 
Absolute  then  is  a  living,  single,  and  seamless  whole  of  experi¬ 
ence,  in  which  thought  and  will  find  their  fruition,  in  -which 
every  flame  of  passion  chaste  or  carnal  burns,  not  in  separation, 
but  as  an  element  in  the  perfect  and  utterly  harmonious  whole 
of  experience.  Outside  this  experience  nothing  can  maintain 
itself.  In  it  all  changes  and  histories,  all  sufferings,  evils,  imper¬ 
fections,  errors,  all  ugliness  and  discords,  are  transmuted  into 
the  eternally  perfect  harmony  of  the  One.  Thus  Mr.  Bradley’s 
view  is  a  speculative  mysticism.  His  nearest  of  kin,  in  spirit,  is 
Plotinus. 

The  most  obvious  difficulties  that  are  suggested  by  this  view  are : 


SPIRITUALISM  OR  IDEALISM 


269 


1.  How  an  experience  can  exist  that  is  not  felt  nor  owned  by 
a  self.  All  experience  seems  to  belong  to  a  self.  Mr.  Bradley 
might  appeal  to  the  poet  Tennyson’s  words: 

“Love  took  up  the  harp  of  Life,  and  smote  on  all  the 
chords  with  might, 

Smote  the  chord  of  Self,  that,  trembling,  passed  in  music 
out  of  sight.” 

2.  How  are  we  to  harmonize  the  eternal  and  timeless  perfec¬ 
tion  of  the  absolute  with  the  facts  of  change,  instability, 
evolution  in  nature,  and  striving,  change,  development,  and  prog¬ 
ress  in  human  life?  Here  Mr.  Bradley  would  say  that  the  goal 
of  all  change,  the  bourne  of  all  progress,  the  cessation  of  suffer¬ 
ing  and  striving,  lies  in  the  awakening  of  man  to  a  consciousness 
of  his  true  being  in  the  absolute.  These  points  are  more  fully 
developed  in  Chapter  XXIV. 

Mr.  Bosanquet’s  view  does  not  differ  essentially  from  Mr. 
Bradley’s  except  that  he  seems  to  admit  a  greater  relative  reality 
to  the  physical  order.  His  works  give,  perhaps,  the  best 
balanced  statement  of  objective  idealism,  or  “speculative  philos¬ 
ophy,”  as  he  calls  it,  in  English.  I  have  not  space  to  compare 
in  detail  his  standpoint  with  those  of  Hegel  and  Bradley.  Mr. 
Bosanquet  dwells  less  on  the  contradictoriness  of  finite  lives 
and  experiences  and  more  on  their  positive  contributions  to  the 
whole  or  absolute  than  does  Mr.  Bradley. 

Josiah  Royce,  our  late  American  Idealist,  has  emphasized  the 
volitional  element  in  man  and  nature  and,  therefore,  in  the 
Absolute.  For  him  the  Absolute  is  the  self  of  selves,  the  eternal 
all-knower,  the  solver  of  all  problems,  the  fulfiller  of  all  volitions. 
He  is  the  all-inclusive  self  or  individual.  Our  temporal  and 
fragmentary  lives  are  fragments  of  his  eternally  whole  and  com¬ 
plete  life,  our  ideas,  our  volitions  (Royce  insists  on  the  active  or 
practical  character  of  ideas)  find  their  eternal  and  perfect  fulfill¬ 
ment  in  his  perfect  insight  and  will. 

The  chief  difficulties  of  objective  or  absolute  idealism, 
regarded  as  a  form  of  singularism,  will  be  discussed  in 
a  following  chapter.  In  the  meantime,  may  I  suggest 
that,  if  objective  idealism,  which  seems  on  the  whole  to 
be  the  doctrine  which  squares  best  with  the  postulates  of 
knowledge  and  science  and  with  man’s  practical,  social, 


270 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


and  {esthetic  interests,  is  to  meet  the  criticisms  which 
are  leveled  against  it,  it  must  broaden  its  base  and  become 
dynamic.  Let  us  imagine  that  the  universe  of  finite,  tem¬ 
poral,  developing  multiplicity,  the  universe  which  is 
thronged  with  living  organisms,  selves,  histories,  with  all 
the  struggle,  passion,  and  pathos  of  humanity,  with  planets 
and  star  systems  in  evolution,  is  the  ceaseless  manifestation 
of  the  energizing  life-force,  not  a  mere  cosmic  consciousness 
of  self-revolving  thought  but  an  eternally  creative  life,  will, 
spirit ;  and  yet  the  central  peace  that  abideth  at  the  heart 
of  things,  the  inexhaustible  fountain  of  energy,  life,  and 
thought,  the  source  and  conservator  of  values,  life  of  our 
lives,  bone  of  our  bone,  flesh  of  our  flesh,  thought  of  our 
thought,  feeling  of  our  feeling  and  yet  transcending  all 
finite  energy,  will,  feeling  and  thought,  as  being  the  eter¬ 
nally  creative  self -existent  fountain,  ground  and  goal  of 
all  life,  will,  thought,  aspiration !  Might  we  not  thus  dimly 
see  that  there  may  be  peace  in  the  midst  of  strife,  harmony 
ruling  through  discord,  values  victorious  through  the  striv¬ 
ing,  struggling  lives  of  men  and  animals,  a  good  that 
overcomes  and  is  richer  for  evil,  a  joy  that  swallows  up 
and  is  deeper  for  suffering,  a  truth  that  is  fuller  and  more 
concrete  for  all  the  fragments,  which,  seen  apart  from  one 
another,  seem  error  ? 


References 

*  Adamson,  R.,  Fichte. 

*  Avey,  A.  E.,  Readings  in  Philosophy ,  Chapter  XVIII. 

*  Berkeley,  Three  Dialogues  Between  Hylas  and  Philonous,  and 

Principles  of  Human  Knowledge  (Open  Court  Series  or 
Fraser’s  Selections). 

Bosanquet,  B.,  The  Principle  of  Individuality  and  Value,  and 
The  Meeting  of  Extremes  in  Contemporary  Philosophy. 
Bradley,  F.  H.,  Appearance  and  Reality,  Second  Edition. 

*  Calkins,  Mary  W.,  The  Persistent  Problems  of  Philosophy. 

*  Caird,  E.,  Hegel. 


SPIRITUALISM  OR  IDEALISM 


271 


Caird,  E.,  The  Evolution  of  Religion. 

Carr,  H.  Wildon,  A  Theory  of  Monads. 

*  Croce,  B.,  What  is  Living  and  What  is  Dead  in  Hegel's 

Philosophy f 

*  Duncan,  G.  M.,  Philosophical  Works  of  Leibnitz. 

*  Fichte,  Vocation  of  Man  (Open  Court  Series). 

*  Fraser,  A.  C.,  Berkeley. 

Green,  T.  H.,  Prolegomena  to  Ethics. 

Hegel,  Philosophy  of  Mind,  and  Logic  (translated  by  Wallace). 

*  Latta,  R.,  Leibniz,  The  Monadology,  etc. 

*  Leibnitz,  Monadology  (In  Open  Court  Series). 

*  Leighton,  J.  A.,  Man  and  the  Cosmos,  especially  Chapters  VIII, 

XVII,  XXII-XXXIII,  and  XXXV-XXXVIII ;  and  Typical 
Modern  Conceptions  of  God. 

Rogers,  A.  K.,  English  and  American  Philosophy  since  1800, 
Chapters  V  and  VI. 

*  Royce,  J.,  The  Spirit  of  Modern  Philosophy,  Part  II,  and  The 

World  and  the  Individual,  Vol.  I,  Lectures  VII  and  VIII, 
and  Volume  II,  Lectures  II,  IV  and  V. 

Russell,  B.,  The  Philosophy  of  Leibnitz. 

*  Seth,  James,  English  Philosophers,  Part  II,  Chapter  I. 

*  Sinclair,  May,  The  New  Idealism. 

*  Smith,  Wm.,  The  Popular  Works  of  Fichte. 

*  Sorley,  W.  R.,  History  of  English  Philosophy. 

*  Thilly-  or  Rogers’  History  of  Philosophy,  Chapters  on  Leib¬ 

nitz,  Fichte,  and  Hegel. 

Windelband,  W.,  Geschichte  der  neuern  Philosophic,  and  His¬ 
tory  of  Philosophy. 


CHAPTER  XIX 


THE  IDENTITY  OR  DOUBLE  ASPECT  THEORY 

The  identity  or  double  aspect  theory  of  the  relation  of 
soul  or  mind  and  body  in  man  and  in  the  universe  was  first 
formulated  by  Spinoza.  It  has  since  been  advanced,  with 
various  modifications,  by  Schelling,  Fechner,  Paulsen,  Her¬ 
bert  Spencer,  Hevmans,  and  others.  Fechner,  Paulsen, 
Stron",  and  others  give  it  a  spiritualistic  twist  and  Haeckel 
gives  it  a  materialistic  twist.  It  has  found  favor  with  many 
psychologists.  According  to  this  theory,  reality  consists 
of  two  irreducible  and  absolutely  parallel  aspects.  They 
do  not  interact ;  they  are  the  two  aspects  of  one  principle 
or  substance.  Ordo  idearum  idem  est  atque  ordo  rerum. 
The  order  of  ideas  is  the  same  as  the  order  of  things,  that 
is,  Spinoza  means  to  say  that  the  mental  and  physiological 
processes  are  parallel  orders.  Each  one  constitutes  a  causal 
nexus  uninfluenced  by  the  other ;  but  each  of  the  two  orders 
is,  down  to  the  minutest  and  most  momentary  event,  an 
expression  of  the  single  determined  order  of  the  one  sub¬ 
stance — God.  Therefore  the  correspondence  between  the 
two  orders  of  events  is  complete.  This  psycho-physical  par¬ 
allelism  rests  on  the  assumption  that  the  degree  of  mental 
organization  and  perfection  corresponds  to  the  degree  of 
bodily  organization  and  perfection  but  the  one  does  not 
cause  the  other.  They  are  two-faced  expressions  of  the 
one  substantial  being.  This  standpoint,  starting  as  a  meta¬ 
physical  interpretation  of  the  relation  of  soul  and  body 
in  man,  is  generalized  into  a  theory  of  the  relation  of 
mind  and  matter  in  the  universe  at  large.  It  thus  passes 

272 


IDENTITY  OR  DOUBLE  ASPECT  THEORY  273 


from  a  psychological  doctrine  into  a  cosmology.  Reality 
is  one,  but  it  has  two  faces  or  aspects,  known  to  us  as 
mind  and  body.  In  itself  the  one  substance  is  neither 
mind  nor  body ;  to  us  it  appears  as  both. 

One  who  thinks  clearly,  and  follows  it  through,  cannot 
stay  in  this  double  aspect  view.  There  is  an  inevitable 
tendency  to  emphasize  the  one  or  the  other  term  of  the 
parallelism,  to  shade  off  from  a  monism  with  two  faces  into 
either  spiritualism  or  materialism.  Nevertheless,  as  regards 
the  relation  of  body  and  soul  there  is  an  element  of  truth 
in  this  view.  Mental  and  neural  processes  do  exhibit  a 
considerable  degree  of  parallelism  and  can  be  thus  fruit¬ 
fully  regarded.  But  the  mental  self  is  not  literally  parallel 
with  the  nervous  system,  notwithstanding  the  fact  that  it 
operates  in  the  closest  connection  with  the  nervous  system. 

The  self  is  a  more  intimate  and  unique  kind  of  unity  than 
even  a  living  organism.1  It  is  a  unity  whose  constituent 
parts  are  not  parts  in  any  spatial,  or  even  numerical,  sense  ; 
they  are  distinguishable,  but  not  separable,  aspects  or 
phases  of  a  living  and  indivisible  unity.  Each  moment  of 
a  self ’s  life  is  the  single  pulsation  of  a  continuous  activity. 
The  elements  of  a  self  completely  interpenetrate  one  an¬ 
other.  Furthermore,  self-consciousness,  the  consciousness 
of  being  conscious,  of  feeling,  acting,  and  thinking,  is  a 
property  possessed  by  nothing  in  the  world  except  thinking 
selves ;  a  property  that,  strictly  speaking,  has  no  physical 
parallel. 

If  psychological  parallelism  be  taken  to  mean  that  mental 
and  physiological  or  neurological  processes  run  parallel  to 
one  another,  but  never  influence  one  another,  it  is  open  to 
three  fatal  criticisms:  1.  It  is  not  a  fact  that  bodily  and 
mental  processes  do  not  influence  one  another,  and  the 
supposed  parallelism  cannot  be  worked  out  in  minute 


1  Cf.  Chapter  XXV,  The  Self. 


274 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


detail;  for  (a)  we  cannot  identify  mental  processes  corre¬ 
sponding  to  every  sort  of  bodily  process ;  events  are 
constantly  occurring  in  organisms  (metabolisms,  secretions) 
to  which  no  corresponding  mental  process  can  be  shown ; 
(b)  there  is  no  balanced  correspondence  or  equivalence 
between  the  physiological  correlates  and  the  mental  mani¬ 
festations,  social  and  individual  (consider  the  mental  and 
social  differences  between  receiving,  by  telegraph,  the  news 
respectively  of  an  invitation  to  play  golf,  of  the  death  of 
one ’s  beloved  child,  of  a  bequest  of  a  million  dollars,  of  the 
capitulation  of  the  German  army)  ;  (c)  the  self  functions 
as  a  unity,  not  always  in  the  same  degree,  but  at  its  best 
moments  very  fully ;  what,  then,  is  parallel  in  the  physio¬ 
logical  series  to  this  dynamic  unity  of  thought  and  volition  ? 
Parallelism  is  atomistic  in  principle  and  can,  logically,  have 
no  place  for  the  unity  of  the  self  ;  (d)  the  mental  and  bodily 
processes  that  correspond  should  be  synchronous,  if  paral¬ 
lelism  be  strictly  true,  but  they  actually  follow  one  another 
in  time. 

2.  If  parallelism  be  true  then  there  must  be  mental 
processes  corresponding  to  everything  that  goes  on  in  atoms 
or  electrons.  We  should  then  have  a  doctrine  of  the  feelings, 
thoughts  and  volitions  of  the  atoms  and  electrons,  their 
loves  and  hates,  joys  and  sorrows — in  short,  an  electronic 
psychology  and  sociology.  This  is  simply  the  utter  confu¬ 
sion  of  thought  and  science. 

3.  Parallelism  sets  out  from  an  extreme  dualism  and 
then  violently  converts  it  into  an  abstract  monism.  The 
parallelism  of  mental  and  physical  would  be  inexplicable, 
unless  these  are  two  aspects  of  one  substance  which  is  the 
real  reality.  What,  then,  is  this  one  substance?  If  it  be 
an  unknown  third  or  X  then  we  have  a  doctrine  which 
explains  the  relatively  unknown  by  the  absolutely  unknown. 
We  do  not  know  the  inner  “go”  of  the  relations  of  mind 
and  body.  But,  certainly,  it  is  no  illumination,  but  rather 


IDENTITY  OR  DOUBLE  ASPECT  THEORY  275 


a  further  darkening,  of  this  mystery,  to  be  told  that  mind 
and  body  are  absolutely  parallel  aspects  of  an  unknown 
third ;  that  this  is  the  real  reality.  If  it  means  that  reality 
is  psychical,  that  is  true  of  some,  but  not  of  all,  actual 
forms  of  being.  And,  if  it  means  that  the  real  reality  is 
the  physical,  parallelism  is  then  a  specious  name  for 
materialism. 

Summary  View  of  the  Mind-Body  Problem 

The  following  seems  to  me  the  most  reasonable  hypothesis. 
There  are  three  grades  of  individua :  (1)  Inorganic  or 
Physical  Individua  or  Monads.  These  are  dynamic  centers, 
which  yield  sense  qualities  when  they  are  in  interactive 
relations  with  percipients.  All  that  can  be  said  about  them, 
when  they  are  not  being  perceived,  is  that  they  have  the 
real  possibilities  of  yielding  sense  qualities.  Physical 
individua  attract  and  repel  one  another  and  they  form 
aggregates,  varying  in  complexity  and  coherence  from  a 
heap  of  sand  to  a  crystal  or  a  magnet.  (2)  Vital  Individim 
or  Monads.  These  develop  and  maintain  themselves  by 
processes  in  which  they  utilize  inorganic  monads.  They 
reproduce  their  kinds,  but,  especially  by  sexual  reproduc¬ 
tion,  with  constant  variations.  Thus,  vital  monads  have  a 
plasticity  both  of  adjustment,  self -maintenance  and  repro¬ 
duction  much  greater  than  inorganic  monads.  Some, 
perhaps  all,  of  them  have  sentience  or  feeling.  Inorganic 
monads  are  instrumental  and  constituent  to  the  organization 
of  life  and  thus,  indirectly,  to  the  operation  of  mind.  (3) 
Mental  Individua  or  Selves.  These  develop  and  function 
in  organized  bodies.  They  are  centers  of  awareness,  mem¬ 
ory,  reflection,  selection,  valuation,  invention,  and  rational 
or  purposive  conation  or  volition.  They  are  in  space  and 
time,  in  the  sense  that  they  are  associated  with  spatial 
configurations  and  have  histories.  But  they  are  not  bounded 


276 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


by  space  and  time  in  the  same  sense  in  which  physical 
bodies  are ;  for  they  have  the  power  to  know  at  great  dis¬ 
tances,  and,  partially,  to  conquer  space,  as  well  as  to  span 
time  by  making  records  and  executing  purposes. 

Inorganic  monads  do  not,  as  such,  develop  into  selves ; 
but,  on  the  other  hand,  there  is  no  absolute  dualism  of 
character  such  as  would  prevent  a  mutual  influence.  If 
inorganic  monads  actually  became  selves,  then  there  would 
be  no  real  grounds  for  distinguishing  between  their 
respective  characteristics  or  modes  of  behavior.  Then  we 
should  have,  not  only  a  psychology  and  sociology  of  the 
electron  but,  as  well,  a  logic,  ethics,  aesthetics  of  electrons 
and  molecules.  The  distinction  between  physical  science 
and  the  moral  and  social  sciences  would  vanish.  Some 
monistic  fanatics  look  for  this  happy  consummation.  To 
my  mind,  it  is  to  blot  out,  rather  than  to  fill  in,  the  linea¬ 
ments  of  genuine  science. 

The  realist2  is  correct  in  his  contention  that  no  convincing 
argument  has  been  advanced  for  the  view  that  all  that 
exists  is  psychic  content,  stuff,  or  “ideas.”  And  the 
burden  of  the  proof  is  upon  him  who  assumes  that  every 
thing  in  the  universe  is  simply  psychic  stuff ;  for,  on  the 
face  of  it,  as  well  as  when  its  behavior  is  probed  by  science, 
the  physical  realm  does  not  appear  to  be  psychic  stuff. 
On  the  other  hand,  we  can  know  nothing  about  anything 
that  is  not  either  actual  or  possible  matter  of  experience, 
or,  that,  as  law,  universal,  concept  or  value,  does  not  belong 
to  the  texture  of  experience.  But  to  say  that,  in  order  that 
anything  may  be,  or  may  become,  known,  it  must  be 
psychical  stuff,  seems  like  arguing  that  he  who  would  drive 
fat  oxen  must  himself  be  fat. 

The  contemporary  objective  idealist  does  not  mean  that 

2  I  suggest  that,  after  reading  this  chapter,  the  student  read 
Chapter  XX  on  Recent  Realism,  and  then  return  to  the  considera¬ 
tion  of  the  above  paragraphs. 


IDENTITY  OR  DOUBLE  ASPECT  THEORY  277 


the  stuff  or  content  of  reality  is  all  psychical  or  mental. 
He  means  that  the  structure  and  drift  or  meaning  of 
reality,  taken  as  a  whole,  is  the  partly  actual,  and  partly 
possible,  expression  and  instrument  of  purposes  and  ideals. 
He  means  that  values  and  ideals  are  not  the  blind  products 
and  playthings  of  mass  particles  in  motion.  In  this  sense 
of  teleological  or  axiological  idealism,  there  is  no  halfway 
house  open  to  man  between  idealism  and  materialism,  ex¬ 
cept  the  frail  shelter  which  accepts  a  final  dualism  between 
the  order  of  nature  and  the  order  of  values,  and,  declining 
either  to  affirm  or  deny  that  ideal  values  are  mere  human 
allusions,  is,  nevertheless,  constrained  to  regard  them  as 
homeless  and  unparented  waifs  adrift  in  the  cosmic  storms. 
(See  further  Chapter  XXVII.)  Thus  realism  in  epis¬ 
temology  leads,  according  to  the  weight  attributed  to  the 
values  of  personality  in  relation  to  the  physical  world, 
either  to  materialism,  idealism,  or  agnosticism,  in  meta¬ 
physics. 

In  view  of  the  varied  and  misleading  meanings  of  the 
word  “Idealism”  it  would,  perhaps,  be  better  to  call  the 
view  which  I  have  stated,  as  my  own,  “Organic  experien- 
tialism.  ’  ’  I  will  now  summarize  this  view. 

Reality  is  experience  (actual  and  possible).  It  is  an 
organized  whole  having  many  degrees  of  individuality. 
So  far  I  go  with  Leibnitz.  The  whole  world  is  a  dynamic 
process,  but  the  physical  world  is  not  psychical  in  itself. 
Selves  are  true  parts  of  the  world.  The  physical  order  is 
the  substructure  of  the  social  order.  There  is  therefore 
nothing  real  which  is  not  subject  or  object  of  either  actual 
or  possible  experience.  Furthermore,  experience  is  social. 
AYhat  we  mean  by  the  physical  is  that  which  is  accessible 
to  all  selves.  Of  the  individual  self  we  can  have  no 
adequate  conception  apart  from  society.  The  individual 
lives  and  develops  only  as  a  member  of  a  social  order. 
Now  the  physical  is  the  real,  common  ground  of  our  social 


278 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


activities.  But  the  social  and  spiritual  is  also  a  true  part 
of  the  real.  The  physical  is  intelligible  and  is  to  some 
extent  subject  to  human  control.  And  because  of  this  we 
may  say  it  is  a  part  of  a  teleological  system,  but  it  is  not  a 
figment  of  the  ego’s  imagination,  as  Fichte  came  perilously 
near  saying.  Nor  is  nature  the  mere  subservient  tool  of 
purpose  interpreted  in  a  narrowly  humanistic  or  super- 
naturalistic  fashion,  as  was  done  by  older  naive  and  pre¬ 
evolutionary  teleologists  in  their  watchmaker  theories  of 
design.  (Of  this  matter  more  anon.) 

In  the  real  world  of  actual  and  really  possible  experience, 
which  is  the  only  world  that  has  concrete  meanings  for 
human  beings,  selves-in-societal-relations  and  physical 
nature  are  in  organic  or  functional  interdependence.  They 
are  coordinates  and  therefore  functions  one  of  another. 
Reality  contains  nonmental  individuated  centers  of  force 
or  dynamic  relationship,  vitally  organized  and  psychical 
individuals  of  various  grades  of  wealth  of  content,  degree 
of  organization  and  harmony.  All  these  various  types  of 
individual  or  monads  live  and  function  in  what,  for  want 
of  a  better  term,  I  call  “organic  or  functional”  interrelation 
and  interexistence.  The  highest  type  of  individuum  that 
we  know  is  a  rational  human  individual  or  personality.  In 
human  individuality  the  functioning  of  mind  is  conditional 
upon  the  functioning  of  a  central  nervous  system,  but,  as  I 
have  already  argued,  we  are  not  compelled,  since  we  have 
not  sufficient  grounds  for  the  assumption,  to  say  that  mind 
and  nervous  system  are  absolutely  identical.  An  individual 
mind  is  a  conscious,  active,  and  selective  center  of  meanings 
and  values  expressing  itself  through,  and  therefore  condi¬ 
tioned  by,  a  physiological  organization.  The  mind  is  the 
dynamic  meaning  and  purpose  of  the  body.  The  relation 
between  them  is  not  properly  described  as  “causal.”  It 
is  the  functional  interdependence  of  two  systems  which, 


IDENTITY  OR  DOUBLE  ASPECT  THEORY  279 


together,  constitute  a  teleological  whole  and  in  which  body 
is  the  teleological  instrument  of  mind. 

Such,  with  reference  to  the  soul-body  and  mind-matter 
problems,  is  the  standpoint  which  may  be  called  “organic 
experientialism ”  or  “dynamic  idealism.” 

References 

*  Avey,  A.  E.,  Readings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  XIX. 

*  James,  William,  Essays  in  Radical  Empiricism,  especially, 

Does  Consciousness  Exist  f 

*  Leighton,  J.  A.,  Man  and  the  Cosmos,  Chapters  XIX,  XX, 

XXI  and  XXVII. 

*  Mach,  Ernst,  Analysis  of  the  Setisations. 

*  Paulsen,  F.,  Introduction  to  Philosophy,  Book  I,  Chapter  I, 

pp.  74-111. 

*  Spinoza,  F.,  Ethics,  especially  Book  I. 

Strong,  C.  A.,  Why  the  Mind  Has  a  Body. 


CHAPTER  XX 


RECENT  REALISM 

I.  The  Meanings  of  Realism 

The  term  “Realism”  has  a  variety  of  meanings;  in  this 
respect  it  is  in  the  same  boat  with  the  antithetical  term 
“Idealism.”  Plato’s  philosophy  is  realistic,  in  the  sense 
that  it  affirms  the  enduring  reality  of  the  Ideas  or 
universals,  bv  contrast  with  the  transitoriness  of  their 
phenomenal  embodiments.  Aristotle  is  even  more  realistic, 
in  that  he  seems  to  accord  to  matter  a  shade  more  reality 
than  does  Plato. 

Modern  realism  includes  a  variety  of  doctrines,  but 
common  to  them  all  is  the  assertion  of  the  existence  of 
realities  of  some  description  independent  of  and  other  than, 
minds.  Taken  in  this  sense  the  proper  contrast  is  between 
Realism  and  Mentalism  or  Spiritualism.  In  metaphysics  a 
realist  may  be  a  materialist,  or  a  dualist,  or  a  neutral 
monist,  or  a  multiplicist  (one  who  believes  in  more  than 
two  kinds  of  real  being)  ;  a  realist  may  have  a  theory  which 
affords  a  permanent  place  for  human  values,  if  he  be  not  a 
materialist.1 

With  the  exception  of  Thomas  Reid’s  Philosophy  of 
Common  Sense,  and  Herbart  in  Germany,  realism  played 
an  insignificant  part  in  modern  philosophy  until  near  the 
end  of  the  nineteenth  century.  Since  then  it  has  grown  in 
volume  and  influence  and  is  one  of  the  three  major  tenden¬ 
cies  of  contemporary  philosophy ;  the  other  two  being 

1  Thomas  Aquinas,  and  in  present-day  philosophy,  S.  Alexander, 
R.  B.  Perry  and  E.  G.  Spaulding  are  epistemological  realists  who 
affirm  the  validity  of  spiritual  values. 

280 


RECENT  REALISM 


281 


objective  idealism  or  “speculative  philosophy, ’ 1  as  Dr. 
Bosanquet  calls  it ;  and  pragmatism  or  instrumentalism. 

All  forms  of  the  new  realism  agree  in  holding  that  many 
of  the  objects  of  knowledge  exist  independent  of  their 
being  known ;  for  example,  the  physical  world  and  other 
minds  than  that  of  the  knower.  Many  realists  also  contend 
that  universal  principles,  such  as  the  principles  of  logic, 
mathematics,  and  the  exact  physical  sciences,  exist  or  “sub¬ 
sist”  independently  of  their  being  known.  Some  realists 
assert  that  even  moral  and  aesthetic  values  subsist  inde¬ 
pendently  of  their  being  known  or  felt. 

All  realists  reject  Berkeley’s  argument  that,  because  what 
is  perceived  implies  a  mind  perceiving  it,  therefore,  what 
is  perceived  can  exist  only  in  and  for  some  mind.  The 
realist  says  that  the  idealist  is  guilty  of  equivocation  in  his 
use  of  the  term  “experience.”  Because  what  I  experience 
seems  to  me  real  and  because  my  experience  implies 
myself  as  ego  or  experient,  the  idealist  argues,  says 
the  new  realist,  that  all  reality  must  be  experience,  and 
therefore  dependent  on  an  ego.  Because  everything  actu¬ 
ally  known  is,  as  an  actual  item  of  knowledge,  present  to  the 
mind  of  a  knower,  it  is  illegitimately  assumed  that  the  being 
of  everything  must  be  being  in  and  for  a  knower.  In  short 
the  idealist  converts  the  proposition  “All  known  being 
involves  a  knower  or  mind,”  into  “ all  being  involves  a 
knower  or  mind,”  dropping  out  the  essential  qualification 
“known.”  But  there  may  be  many  things  and  qualities 
existing  which  are  not  known  to  any  mind.  Certainly  the 
physical  conditions  of  perception,  such  as  vibrations  in  the 
ether  or  the  dance  of  electrons  are  not  perceived  at  all ; 
they  are  inferred  to  exist  as  pre-conditions  of  perception. 
We  may  be  in  doubt  as  to  what  precisely  are  the  physical 
conditions  of  perception  in  the  external  world.  We  may 
not  even  know  what  goes  on  in  our  nervous  systems.  But 
we  can  scarcely  doubt  that  some  sort  of  physical  or  non- 


282 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


mental  events  are  the  indispensable  conditions  of  mental 
events.  If  this  be  so  in  the  case  of  human  knowing,  we 
have  no  right  to  jump  to  the  conclusion  that  the  physical 
conditions  of  knowledge  are  acts  of  other  minds.  To  argue 
that,  because  known-being  implies  a  mind,  therefore  all 
being  is  being  in  and  for  a  mind,  is  to  ignore  the  mass  of 
evidence  which  goes  to  show  that  a  mind  is  a  function  of  a 
certain  type  of  physical  organization,  namely,  a  nervous 
system.  The  realist  can  admit  that  minds  are  important 
items  of  reality,  but  not  that  they  are  the  all-important 
items. 

Indeed,  says  the  realist,  in  the  very  act  of  knowing  an 
object  (whether  that  object  be  a  physical  thing,  a  scientific 
principle,  or  a  mind)  it  is  implied  that  the  existence  of  the 
object  is  independent  of  the  act  of  knowing  it,  otherwise 
there  would  be  no  difference  between  imaginary  beings  and 
real  beings.  Even  in  knowing  my  own  mind,  what  is  known 
is  different  from  the  knowing  of  it.  If  I  know  that  I  am 
in  love  or  unhappy,  I  must  first  be  in  these  states  before  I 
can  know  them.  By  the  reality  of  a  physical  thing,  or  the 
truth  of  a  rational  principle,  as  known ,  I  do  not  mean  that 
I  have  invented  it  out  of  whole  cloth,  but  that  I  have 
discovered  or  recognized  its  reality. 

On  the  latter  point  there  is  no  need  for  quarrel  between 
objective  idealists  (such  as  Leibnitz,  Hegel,  or  Bosanquet) 
and  realists.  Indeed,  the  gist  of  the  objective  idealists’ 
argument  for  an  absolute  mind  or  cosmic  experient  is,  as 
we  have  seen,  that  reality  must  have  an  organized  structure 
or  texture,  since  the  more  we  interpret  experience  in  terms 
of  thought  the  better  we  apprehend  its  rational  organiza¬ 
tion.  Against  this  argument  many  realists  retort  that  the 
statement  that  reality  is  one  complete  whole  or  individual 
is  an  assumption  without  warrant.  It  is  more  in  accord 
with  the  facts,  say  these  realists,  to  affirm  that  reality  is 
simply  an  aggregate  of  many  examples  of  several  kinds  of 


RECENT  REALISM 


283 


entities,  some  of  which  are  interdependent,  but  many  of 
which  are  independent  of  one  another.  Thus  they  are 
metaphysical  pluralists.  Dr.  S.  Alexander,  w^e  shall  see,  is 
a  singularistic  realist,  B.  Russell  a  pluralistic  realist. 

With  respect  to  what  entities  or  “things,”  in  a  broad 
sense  of  the  term,  exist  independent  of  minds,  all  realists 
are  not  in  agreement.  Some  approach  the  position  of  naive 
realism  that  everything  perceived  or  conceived  has  physical 
existence.  S.  Alexander  attributes  physical  existence  even 
to  images,  illusions,  and  hallucinations.  Others  (and  these 
are  the  great  majority)  hold  that  the  perceived  qualities 
are  the  results  of  the  interaction  of  minds  and  nervous 
systems  with  the  microscopic  motions  of  minute  physical 
things  (atoms,  electrons,  ether  waves,  et  cetera).  In  the 
absence  of  percipients  only  the  latter  things  exist.  Those 
who  admit  the  independent  existence  of  minds  are  dualists. 
Others  (especially  certain  American  neorealists)  regard 
the  mind  as  simply  a  function  of  the  nervous  system,  but 
they  avoid  materialism  by  the  hypothesis  that  all  minds  and 
bodies  are  compounded  of  one  sort  of  stuff,  which  in  itself 
is  “neutral”  in  character;  that  is,  neither  mental  nor 
physical.2 

I  shall  examine  in  this  order  the  doctrines  of  neutral 
monism,  of  Bertrand  Russell  and  S.  Alexander,  and  con¬ 
clude  with  some  critical  remarks  on  realism. 

II.  Neutral  Monism 

Among  American  thinkers,  instrumentalism  in  particular 
(in  John  Dewey  and  his  congeners)  has  become  more  or 


2  In  the  most  recent  realistic  work,  Essays  in  Critical  Realism, 
bv  Drake  and  others,  the  writers  do  not  seem  to  agree  as  to  what 
the  stuff  of  reality  may  be.  They  are  content  to  agree  that  what 
the  mind  knows,  through  sense  data,  are  essences  which  are  dif¬ 
ferent  from  the  sense  qualities.  For  them  the  sense  qualities  are 
signs  or  representatives  of  these  independent  essences. 


284 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


less  behavioristic,  in  its  conception  of  the  mind  and,  thus, 
has  become  increasingly  realistic.  (See  Chapter  XXII.) 
For  realism,  beginning  with  the  denial  of  the  privileged 
position  of  mind  in  the  universe,  sometimes  leads  on  to 
minimizing  the  function  of  conscious  mentality  in  man 
regarded  as  a  biological  organism ;  and  the  further  step 
is  a  short  one  to  the  assertion  that  consciousness  either  does 
not  exist,  or,  if  it  exist,  does  not  play  any  other  role  in  life 
than  that  of  an  impotent  spectator  of  the  game. 

In  general  the  ultrabehavioristic  conception  of  man  is 
that  he  is  to  be  regarded  as  a  bundle  or  complex  of  physio¬ 
logical  reflexes.  Thought  is  viewed  simply  as  a  complex 
of  speech  reactions,  built  up  out  of  elementary  reflexes  in 
a  similar  fashion  to  those  in  which  walking,  dancing,  and 
other  forms  of  skill  are  built  up.  From  the  standpoint  of 
ultra  behaviorism  we  must  substitute,  for  the  statements 
“Man  is  a  rational  animal”  and  “Man  is  a  mental  and 
physical  individuality,”  the  statement  “Man  is  a  compli¬ 
cated,  physico-chemical  mechanism  built  up  out  of  elemen¬ 
tary  physiological  reflexes  evolved  in  the  struggle  for 
existence  and  transmitted  through  the  germ  plasm.”3  Short 
of  this  ultra  behaviorism,  which  finds  no  useful  function 
for  consciousness  or  mind,  is  moderate  behaviorism,  which 
admits  that  consciousness  makes  a  difference  in  human 
behavior.4 

The  reduction  or  elimination  of  “mind,”  as  a  causal 
factor  in  behavior,  naturally  leads  to  a  metaphysical  mon¬ 
ism  which  must  be  either  materialistic  or  neutral.  The 
ultra  behaviorist  is  possessed  by  the  irresistible  desire  to  get 


3  Cf.  J.  B.  Watson’s  Behavior,  An  Introduction  to  Comparative 
Psychology,  New  York,  1914;  and  Psychology  from  the  Standpoint 
of  a  Behaviorist,  Philadelphia,  1919. 

4  H.  C.  Warren’s  Human  Psychology,  Boston,  1919,  is  a  good 
exposition  of  moderate  behaviorism.  It.  S.  Woodworth’s  Psychology, 
New  York,  1921,  seems  to  me  to  include  whatever  is  of  essential 
value  in  behaviorism. 


RECENT  REALISM 


285 


rid  of  dualism;  this  is  his  dominating  “ complex/ ’  If 
consciousness  does  not  perform  any  unique  function  in  the 
world,  why  should  we  suppose  that  there  is  any  unique 
distinction  between  sentient  and  insentient  stuff  ?  Why  not 
say  that  everything  is  made  of  the  same  stuff,  complicated 
in  various  ways?  Behavioristic  realists  shy  at  a  crass 
materialism  and  in  general  incline  to  regard  the  physical 
and  the  mental  as  two  different  wTays  of  taking  the  same 
“neutral”  stuff.  By  calling  this  fundamental  stuff  “neu¬ 
tral,”  they  mean  that  in  itself  it  is  neither  physical  nor 
mental ;  it  will  appear  as  either  the  one  or  the  other, 
according  to  the  way  in  which  it  is  conceived.  The  world 
of  physics,  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  world  of  psychology 
(including  in  the  latter  all  human  reactions,  attributes,  and 
activities  in  social  and  cultural,  as  well  as  individual  life), 
on  the  other  hand,  are  just  two  ways  of  looking  at  what  is 
in  essence  the  same  stuff  of  reality. 

This  neutral  tendency  was  given  a  great  impetus  by 
William  James’  three  essays  entitled  “A  World  of  Pure 
Experience,”  “Does  Consciousness  Exist,”  and  “The 
Place  of  Affectional  Facts  in  a  World  of  Pure  Experience,” 
et  cetera,  collected  together  in  his  volume,  Essays  in  Radical 
Empiricism.  It  has  affinities  with  Avenarius’  concept  of 
pure  experience  and  with  the  sensationalistic  phenomenalism 
of  Ernst  Mach. 

James  proposed  to  get  rid  of  the  duality  of  consciousness 
and  its  objects  by  taking  a  radical  step  and  thus  rightly 
called  his  doctrine  “radical  empiricism.”  He  says  there 
is  no  such  entity  as  consciousness.  The  standing  assumption 
of  common  sense  is  that  there  is  a  duplicity  in  experience — 
kncwer  and  known,  thought  and  things.  James  says  “Expe¬ 
rience,  I  believe,  has  no  such  inner  duplicity” ;  5  “thoughts 
in  the  concrete  are  made  of  the  same  stuff  as  things  are.”  6 


5  Essays  in  Radical  Empiricism,  p.  9. 

6  Ibid.,  p.  37. 


286 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


‘  *  The  instant  field  of  the  present  is  at  all  times  what  I  call 
'pure’  experience. ” 7  The  sum  total  of  all  experience  “is 
a  that,  an  absolute,  a  ‘pure’  experience  on  an  enormous 
scale,  undifferentiated  and  undifferentiable  into  thought 
and  thing  ” ; 8  “  experience  as  a  whole  is  self -containing 
and  leans  on  nothing.”  9  It  is  “the  selfsame  piece  of  pure 
experience,  taken  twice  over,  that  serves  now  as  thought  and 
now  as  thing.  ’  ’ 10  I  am  writing  at  a  desk.  The  paper,  the 
desk,  and  the  pencil  are  bits  of  pure  experience.  If  they 
are  taken  in  their  spatial  relations  in  the  house,  they  thus 
become  physical  things ;  but,  if  they  are  taken  as  items  in 
my  personal  biography,  they  thus  become  thoughts.  As 
virginal  experiences  they  are  neither  thoughts  nor  things, 
and  their  being  taken  as  either  the  one  or  the  other  is  an 
addition  to  their  original  natures  as  just  pure  experiences. 
As  for  the  relations  which  seem  to  do  the  taking  and  thus 
the  dualizing  or  dichotomizing  of  the  world  of  pure  expe¬ 
rience,  they  too  are  experiences  of  transition  which  no  Ego 
has  or  makes.  They  just  happen.  The  relations  are  empir¬ 
ical  data  like  the  substantive  bits  of  pure  experience  between 
which  they  are  transitions  or  passages. 

In  short,  the  color,  shape,  and  touch  qualities  of  the  desk 
are  the  physical  desk,  when  taken  in  their  space  relations; 
the  color,  shape,  and  touch  qualities  are  my  mind,  as  per¬ 
ceiving  the  desk,  when  these  qualities  are  regarded  as  events 
which  happen  in  the  history  of  a  living  body.  It  is  all  a 
question  of  how  you  take  them.  The  paper  on  which  I  am 
writing  is  physical,  as  a  patch  of  color  and  touch  quality 
on  the  desk ;  the  paper  is  my  mind,  when  the  sense  qualities 
which  are  the  paper  are  viewed  as  happening  to  this  series 
of  events  which  is  called  a  human  body. 

This  seems  a  beautifully  simple  way  of  circumventing  all 
the  difficulties  which  arise  from  the  duality  of  Ego  knowing 


7  Essays  in  Radical  Empiricism,  p.  23. 

ZIbid.,  p.  134. 


9  Ibid.,  p.  193. 

10  Ibid.,  p.  27. 


RECENT  REALISM 


287 


and  object  known.  It  solves  the  problem  of  the  self  by 
saying  it  consists  of  certain  transitional  experiences.  Con¬ 
sciousness  becomes  a  clumsy  and  misleading  name  for  cer¬ 
tain  empirical  groupings.  There  is  no  longer  any  problem 
of  mind  and  body  on  our  hands,  since  mind  and  body  are 
merely  the  same  pure  experiences  connected  by  other  pure 
experiences  of  relation  or  transition.  Knowing,  affection, 
and  willing  consist  of  certain  transitional  feelings,  and 
material  movements  consist  of  other  transitional  feelings. 
No  Ego  feels  the  feelings  or  knows  the  knowledges.  All 
things  flow  and  all  things,  including  the  rates  and  kinds 
of  flowing,  are  simply  experiences.  A  personal  history  is 
simply  an  experience  of  continuous  transition. 

James’  doctrine  has  been  taken  up  by  certain  American 
neorealists,  especially  by  Perry  and  Holt.  According  to 
the  latter,  the  world  consists  of  neutral  elements,  that  is, 
elements  that  are  neither  physical  nor  psychical.  These 
elements  are  numerically  many  but  qualitatively  of  the 
same  substance.  They  are  logical  “terms”  and  “proposi¬ 
tions,”  but  active  and  generative  of  more  complex  entities. 
These  elements  constitute  an  indefinite  variety  of  complexes, 
since  they  may  enter  an  indefinite  variety  of  group  or  class 
relations.  They  are  the  foundation  stones  of  the  universe. 
Mind  is  a  class  or  group  of  neutral  entities,  as  a  physical 
object  is  another  class  or  group.  A  mind  makes  a  cross 
section  of  the  world  which  is  always  a  group  of  the  neutral 
components  of  the  object  and  its  immediate  relations. 
Consciousness  is  any  part  of  the  field  of  neutral  entities 
that  is  illuminated.  Mere  illumination  makes  no  change 
in  the  natures  of  the  entities.  They  may  exist  the  same  in 
relation  and  out  of  relation  to  consciousness.  Consciousness 
is  like  a  searchlight  that  plays  over  the  entities.11  The 
work  of  selection  and  illumination,  which  results  in  con- 


11  Holt  in  The  Neic  Realism,  p.  352  ff. 


288 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


sciousness,  is  done  by  the  central  nervous  system.12  The 
processes  of  the  nervous  system  are  of  a  mathematical  and 
neutral  structure,13  like  all  physical  processes.  Holt  would 
even  define  a  collision  between  two  railroad  engines  as  a 
contradiction  between  two  groups  of  logical  entities.  In 
short,  reality  is  resolved  into  an  unearthly  ballet  of  bloodless 
terms  and  propositions.  Neutral  monistic  realism  thus 
turns  around  into  a  pluralistic  logicism. 

Neutral  monism  seems  to  be  but  a  philosophical  aberration 
for  the  following  reasons : 

1.  It  can  offer  no  explanation  of  why  we  should  make  a 
distinction  between  consciousness  and  its  objects,  between 
knowing  and  the  thing  known,  without  invoking  the  nervous 
system  as  the  real  agent.  Much  less  can  it  account  for  the 
fact  of  self-consciousness.  Can  a  searchlight  search  for  its 
own  searchings? 

2.  It  cannot  account  for  the  felt  difference  between 
perception  of  objects  as  present  to  the  percipient  and  imagi¬ 
nation  of  objects  not  so  present. 

3.  It  cannot  account  for  memory  since  the  latter  in¬ 
volves  the  conscious  continuity  of  the  self. 

4.  It  cannot  account  for  error.  If  consciousness  be  but 
the  passively  illuminated  field  of  objects  selected  by  the 
central  nervous  system,  how  can  there  be  wrong  judgments  ? 
The  theory  of  error  requires  the  assumption  of  an  active 
thinker. 

5.  Since  consciousness  is  the  illuminated  field  of  the 
present,  how  can  one  believe  in  nontemporal  propositions 
such  as  those  of  logic,  mathematics  and  natural  science  ? 

6.  Neutral  monism  involves  phychological  atomism.  The 
self  is  resolved  into  an  ever  shifting  phantasmagoria  of 
neutral  entities  selected  by  the  brain. 


12  Holt  in  The  New  Realism ,  p.  352  ff.,  and  Perry,  Present  Philo¬ 
sophical  Tendencies ,  p.  299,  etc. 

is  Holt,  The  Concept  of  Consciousness,  p.  255,  etc. 


RECENT  REALISM 


289 


7.  Since  the  brain  is  the  real  selective  and  attentive 
agency,  the  searchlight  that  makes  the  illumination  which 
is  consciousness,  neutral  monism  is  but  a  new  and  specious 
name  for  materialism.  It  has  no  right  to  be  called  neutral 
monism. 

James’  standpoint  of  radical  empiricism  is  simpler  and 
not  open  to  all  the  above  objections,  because  it  evades  all 
troublesome  problems  as  to  liow  the  “inner  duplicity” 
arises  in  experience  and  would  make  philosophy  a  mere 
description,  without  analysis  and  reconstructive  interpre¬ 
tation,  of  the  flux  of  experience.  James  fails  to  offer  any 
account  as  to  why  or  how  it  happens  that  identically  the 
same  bits  of  experience  get  taken,  respectively,  in  physical 
and  personal  contexts  of  relations.  Personal  biographies, 
appreciations,  judgments,  feelings,  volitions  just  appear 
and  disappear  mysteriously,  hither  and  yon  in  the  flux  of 
experience.  It  is  simpler  and  more  reasonable  to  admit  that 
experience  involves  an  experiencer,  and,  hence,  a  self, 
especially  in  view  of  the  fact  that  one  is  not  only  conscious 
but  may  be  conscious  of  one’s  being  conscious,  that  is,  be 
self-conscious. 

III.  Bertrand  Russell’s  Realism 

The  realism  of  Bertrand  Russell  has  changed  a  good  bit 
in  the  course  of  his  publication.  In  his  earlier  works,  Our 
Knowledge  of  the  External  World  and  The  Problems  of 
Philosophy ,14  he  makes  a  sharp  distinction  between  the 
world  of  sense  data  and  the  world  of  physics.  Among  the 
data  of  our  ordinary  experience,  a  distinction  is  made 
between  “hard”  data  and  “soft”  data.  “Soft”  data  are 
those  data  which  become,  when  subjected  to  critical  scru- 

14  See  especially  Our  Knowledge  of  the  External  World,  Chap¬ 
ters  III  and  IV. 


290 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


tiny,  more  or  less  doubtful;15  “hard”  data  are  those  data 
which  resist  the  solvent  influence  of  criticism.  “The 
hardest  of  hard  data  are  of  two  sorts — the  particular  facts 
of  sense,  and  the  general  truths  of  logic.  ’  ’ 16  The  belief 
in  the  existence  of  sensible  objects  when  not  perceived,  and 
the  belief  in  other  people’s  minds,  are  soft  data.  The 
sense  data  or  sensa — that  is,  the  actually  perceived  colors, 
shapes,  sounds,  et  cetera — are  hard  data.  A  sensation  is 
a  mental  event  which  consists  in  our  being  aware  of  a 
sensible  object.  A  sensible  object  is  one  of  which  wTe  are 
aware.  If  I  believe  I  see  a  real  table,  the  sensible  object 
is  a  patch  of  color  which  is  a  “perspective”  of  the  table. 
I  do  not  see  a  physical  table.  What  we  call  “things”  are 
series  of  perspectives,  for  example,  the  series  of  views 
one  may  have  of  a  table  or  a  teacup,  from  different  situa¬ 
tions.  Since  these  perspectives  are  related  to  the  percipient, 
and  to  one  another  according  to  certain  laws  which  are 
formulated  in  the  science  of  physics,  “Things  are  those 
series  of  aspects  which  obey  the  laws  of  physics.  That  such 
series  exist  is  an  empirical  fact,  which  constitutes  the  veri¬ 
fiability  of  physics.”17  But  physics  presupposes  one 
common  space.  Now  the  individual  does  not  sense  one 
space — the  space  of  sight  differs  from  the  space  of  touch. 
The  one  space  for  the  individual  is  an  intellectual  con¬ 
struction,  into  which  he  fits  both  sight  and  touch  sensa¬ 
tions.  Moreover,  each  individual  has  his  own  “private” 
world  of  space.  No  two  men  perceive  precisely  the  same 
spatial  world.  So  many  percipients,  so  many  private 
worlds.  But  several  men  may  perceive  similar  worlds. 
Suppose  two  men  sitting  in  a  room.  Then  two  similar 
worlds  are  perceived  by  them ;  enter  a  third,  who  sits 
between  them,  and  he  perceives  a  world  intermediate 


15  Our  Knowledge  of  the  External  World,  pp.  70  ff. 

is  Ibid.,  pp.  70-71.  i7  Ibid.,  p.  110. 


RECENT  REALISM 


291 


between  their  worlds.  We  may  suppose,  not  that  what 
he  perceives  existed  before  he  came  in,  but  that  some  aspect 
of  the  universe  from  that  point  of  view  existed.  So  we  may 
think  an  infinite  number  of  possible  points  of  view,  some 
perceived,  many  not  perceived.  These  aspects  constitute 
the  system  of  perspectives  which  makes  up  the  real  world 
of  physics.18  It  is  to  be  noted  that,  in  order  to  get  from  the 
“private”  world  of  each  separate  individual  into  this 
public  space-system,  Russell  has  to  assume  the  existence 
of  other  minds.  He  admits  that  we  cannot  offer  very  strong 
proof  of  the  existence  of  other  minds,  but  holds  that  we 
cannot  help  believing  in  them. 

In  a  similar  fashion  Russell  gets  from  the  private  ‘  ‘  times  ’  ’ 
of  individuals  to  the  notion  of  one  time  which  is  an  intel¬ 
lectual  construction. 

Russell,  thus  far,  is  a  dualist.  He  holds  to  the  existence 
of  minds  and  their  activity ;  the  existence  of  sense  data, 
which  are  for  minds  but  cannot  be  explained  as  caused  by 
them ;  and  the  existence  of  something  independent  of  mind, 
which  is  the  physical  ground  of  our  perceptions  of  sense 
data,  and  of  our  intellectual  construction  of  physical  space, 
time,  and  matter. 

Russell  rejects  the  arguments  of  idealists  on  behalf  of 
the  interdependence  of  terms  and  relations.  The  nature 
of  a  thing  is  identical  with  the  thing.  The  relations  do 
not  make  the  thing  nor  the  thing  the  relations.  Relations 
are  real  as  such;  the  particular  terms  or  entities  which 
they  relate  have  their  “natures”  or  qualities  independent 
of  the  relations  which  relate  them  in  manifold  ways.  Thus 
Russell  is  a  pluralist  or  “logical  atomist.”  The  business 
of  philosophy  is  logical  analysis,  and  its  work  consists  in 
resolving  the  complexes  of  naive  experience  into  their 
atomic  elements.  Analysis  shows  us  that  there  are  three 


is  Our  Knowledge  of  the  External  World,  pp.  87*97. 


292 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


kinds  of  entities:  (1)  general  relations;  (2)  physical  things, 
and  (3)  minds.  These  may  exist  independent  of  one  an¬ 
other  or  in  partial  dependence  on  one  another. 

In  his  latest  work,  The  Analysis  of  Mind,  Russell  ten¬ 
tatively  advocates  the  doctrine  of  neutral  monism.  He 
proposes  to  dispense  entirely  with  the  subject,  or  self,  as 
being  a  gratuitous  hypothesis.  ( Analysis  of  Mind,  p.  142.) 
When  we  do  so,  there  is  left  no  distinction  between  sense 
datum  and  sensation,  because  of  course  there  is  no  ego 
to  have  a  sensation.  There  are  data,  but  no  selves  for 
whom  the  data  exist.  “The  stuff  of  the  world,  so  far  as 
we  have  experience  of  it,  consists  of  innumerable  transient 
particulars,  such  as  occur  in  seeing,  hearing,  etc.,  together 
with  images  more  or  less  resembling  these.”  (Ibid.,  p.  143.) 
A  “perception”  becomes  the  appearance  of  an  object  from 
a  place  where  there  is  a  brain.  The  person  is  constituted  by 
relations  of  the  thoughts  to  each  other  and  the  body.  “It 
would  be  better  to  say  it  thinks  in  me”  like  “it  rains  here,” 
or  better  still,  “there  is  a  thought  in  me.”  “To  say  that  it 
is  Jones  who  is  walking  is  merely  to  say  that  the  walking 
in  question  is  part  of  the  whole  series  of  occurrences  which 
is  Jones.”  (Ibid.,  p.  195.)  In  brief,  whether  Jones  thinks, 
walks,  or  falls  in  love,  it  is  simply  a  case  of  certain  bits  of 
the  neutral  stuff  of  the  universe  happening  to  fall  into  a 
peculiar  arrangement  in  a  certain  temporal  series. 

Russell  does  not  go  the  whole  way  with  behaviorism. 
Minds  for  him  are  composed  of  sensations,  images,  and 
a  variety  of  feelings  (of  familiarity,  pastness,  expectation, 
et  cetera).  Even  our  emotions  of  pain  and  pleasure  are 
composites  of  sensations  and  feelings.  But  images  and 
meanings  cannot,  he  thinks,  be  accounted  for  in  purely 
behavioristic  terms.  And  the  outstanding  psychological 
fact  is  mnemic  causation,  which  means  that  the  present  ex¬ 
perience  of  a  mind  is  determined  by  the  past  experience, 
as  well  as  by  the  present  stimulus.  Thus  there  does,  after 


RECENT  REALISM 


293 


all,  seem  to  be  something  rather  unique  about  mind,  al¬ 
though  there  is  no  active  ego  or  self.  The  ‘'active  self” 
Russell  regards  as  the  disappearing  ghost  of  the  “soul.” 

He  sums  up  his  views  as  follows: 

1.  Physics  and  psychology  are  not  distinguished  by 
their  material,  but  by  their  relations.  Physics  groups  par¬ 
ticulars  by  their  active  places,  psychology  by  their  passive 
places. 

2.  The  two  most  essential  characteristics  of  the  causal 
laws  which  would  naturally  be  called  psychological  are 
subjectivity  and  mnemic  causation. 

3.  Habit,  memory,  and  thought  are  all  developments  of 
mnemic  causation.  It  is  probable,  though  not  certain,  that 
mnemic  causation  is  derivative  from  ordinary  physical 
causation  in  nervous  (and  other)  tissue. 

4.  Consciousness  is  a  complex  and  far  from  universal 
characteristic  of  mental  phenomena. 

5.  Mind  is  a  matter  of  degree,  chiefly  exemplified  in 
number  and  complexity  of  habits. 

6.  All  our  data,  both  in  physics  and  psychology,  are 
subject  to  psychological  causal  law.  Physical  causal  laws, 
strictly  speaking,  can  only  be  stated  in  terms  of  matter ; 
which  is  inferred  and  constructed,  never  a  datum.  In  this 
respect  psychology  is  nearer  to  what  actually  exists.  {Ibid., 
p.  307-308.) 

In  short,  the  neutral  stuff  theory  reconciles  a  material¬ 
istic  psychology  with  the  immaterialistic  tendencies  of 
physics.  But,  if  the  reconciliation  is  achieved  by  reducing 
the  self  to  a  mere  momentary  complex  of  unconscious  un¬ 
thinking  “stuff,”  I  think  its  “neutral”  monism  is  only 
a  new  and  specious  name  for  materialism.  The  quintes¬ 
sence  of  materialism  is  the  reduction  of  the  mental  self 
to  an  epiphenomenon  or  by-product  of  nonmental  entities. 

Russell  finds  an  irreconcilable  opposition  between  human 
ideals  and  the  physical  universe.  The  actual  physical  world 


294 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


is  ‘  ‘  omnipotent  matter,  ”  “  blind  to  good  and  evil,  ’  ’  reckless 
of  human  life  and  human  ideals.19  Justice,  fellowship, 
cooperation,  love,  exist  only  as  human  ideals.  They  have 
no  cosmic  support.  Nay,  the  cosmos  grinds  these  dreams 
to  powder  with  man  their  maker.  “  Brief  and  powerless 
is  man ’s  life ;  on  him  and  all  his  race  the  slow,  sure  doom 
falls  pitiless  and  dark.”20  “The  life  of  man  is  a  long 
march  through  the  night,  surrounded  by  invisible  foes,  tor¬ 
tured  by  weariness  and  pain,  towards  a  goal  that  few  can 
hope  to  reach,  and  where  none  may  tarry  long.  One  by  one, 
as  they  march,  our  comrades  vanish  from  our  sight,  seized 
by  the  silent  orders  of  omnipotent  Death.”21 

To  us  is  left  only  the  stoic  and  heroic  endurance  to  be 
faithful,  in  the  face  of  a  pitiless  and  insensate  universe,  to 
human  values.  Our  freedom  lies  in  the  wTill  to  help,  to 
pity,  and  to  love  one  another,  to  renounce,  and  to  endure, 
to  be  free  in  the  empire  of  the  spirit  even  while  we  are  being 
crushed  to  powder,  to  cherish,  while  we  may,  beauty  and 
sublimity,  resignation  and  love.  “For  Man,  condemned 
to-day  to  lose  his  dearest,  to-morrow  himself  to  pass  through 
the  gate  of  darkness,  it  remains  only  to  cherish,  ere  yet  the 
blow  falls,  the  lofty  thoughts  that  ennoble  his  little  day ; 
disdaining  the  coward  terrors  of  the  slave  of  Fate,  to  wor¬ 
ship  at  the  shrine  that  his  own  hands  have  built;  undis¬ 
mayed  by  the  empire  of  chance,  to  preserve  a  mind  free 
from  the  wanton  tyranny  that  rules  his  outward  life ; 
proudly  defiant  of  the  irresistible  forces  that  tolerate,  for 
a  moment,  his  knowledge  and  his  condemnation,  to  sustain 
alone,  a  weary  but  unyielding  Atlas,  the  world  that  his 
own  ideals  have  fashioned  despite  the  trampling  march 
of  unconscious  power.  ’ 9  22 


19  Russell,  “The  Free  Man’s  Worship,”  in  Mysticism  and  Logic, 
Chap.  Ill,  or  Philosophical  Essays,  Chap.  II. 

20  Mysticism  and  Logic,  p.  56. 

21  Ibid.,  p.  56. 


22  Ibid.,  p.  56-57. 


RECENT  REALISM 


295 


A  most  eloquent  and  classic  expression  of  immitigable 
pessimism  and  the  proud  courage  of  utter  despair ;  and  of 
the  worship  of  ethical  values,  abstract  logical  essences,  and 
visions  of  beauty  and  grandeur,  created  out  of  nothing! 

IV.  S.  Alexander’s  Realistic  Metaphysics 

There  are  certain  striking  contrasts  between  Russell’s 
latest  position  and  that  developed  by  Dr.  Samuel  Alexander 
in  his  massive,  elaborate,  and  highly  original  work,  Space, 
Time,  and  Deity.  It  is  impossible,  in  the  present  work, 
to  do  more  than  sketch  very  briefly  some  of  Alexander’s 
main  theses.23  Alexander  rejects  the  pluralism  held  by 
other  neorealists.  Coherence  is  the  test  of  truth,  and  indeed 
of  all  values.  There  are  no  purely  external  relations  in 
reality.  Some  relations  are  extrinsic,  others  essential.  For 
example,  it  is  extrinsic  to  the  nature  of  a  man  as  man 
whether  he  be  or  he  be  not  in  the  relation  of  king,  father, 
or  slave ;  but  even  extrinsic  relations  and  the  natures  of 
the  things  related  by  them  are  not  wholly  indifferent  to 
one  another. 

Reality  is  one  whole — it  is  a  system.  The  whole  reality, 
the  one  stuff  of  all  things,  the  one  all-sustaining  matrix 
of  finite  existences  and  values  is  infinite  space-time.  All 
things  are  finite  configurations  or  complexes  of  space-time ; 
it  is  the  absolute.  Space  and  time  are  intuited  as  infinite 
continuous  wholes  of  parts ;  the  limiting  cases  of  bits  or 
elements  of  space-time  are  point-instants  or  pure  events. 
Point-instants  do  not  exist,  except  as  the  logical  limits  of 
our  analysis  of  concrete  space-time.  Space-time  is  the 
primordial  stuff  or  matrix  out  of  which  things  and  events 
are  made,  the  medium  in  wdiich  they  are  precipitated  and 


23  For  a  fuller  summary  cf.  the  present  writer’s  review  of  Dr. 
Alexander’s  work  in  The  Philosophical  Review ,  Vol.  XXX,  1921; 
pp.  282-297. 


296 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


crystallized.  Mental  space  and  time,  mathematical  space 
and  time,  and  physical  space  and  time,  are  just  the  one 
reality  space-time,  considered  under  different  aspects. 

Space  is  the  “body”  of  which  time  is  the  “soul.”  Space 

is  generated  in,  or  by,  time.  Space  is  the  trail  of  time.  The 

history  of  the  universe  is  a  continuous  redistribution  of 

% 

instants  of  time  among  points  of  space.  (Ibicl.,  Yol.  I,  p.  63.) 
What  we  actually  perceive  are  “perspectives”  of  space- 
time.  Total  space-time  is  the  synthesis  of  all  partial  per¬ 
spectives  of  space-time.  (Ibid.,  Yol.  I,  p.  76.)  At  any 
moment  in  its  real  history  space  is  not  all  of  one  date, 
and  time  is  not  all  at  one  point.  It  is  possible,  because 
time  is  repeated  in  space,  and  space  in  time,  to  speak 
of  time  and  space  as  existing  by  themselves.  But  this 
language  is  the  result  of  an  arbitrary  selection  from  the 
space-time  whole.  “In  order  that  time  should  linger, 
space  must  recur,  a  point  must  be  repeated  in  more  than 
one  instant.”  (Ibid.,  Yol.  I,  p.  49.)  “If  Time  were  bare 
Time  it  would  consist  of  perishing  instants.  Instead  of  a 
continuous  Time,  there  would  be  nothing  more  than  an 
instant,  a  now  which  was  perpetually  being  renewed.  But 
Time  would  then  be  for  itself  and  for  an  observer  a  mere 
now,  and  would  contain  neither  earlier  nor  later.”  (Ibid., 
Yol.  I,  p.  45.)  Time  gives  distinction  to  the  parts  of  space ; 
we  are  able  to  distinguish  the  parts  of  space,  because  dif¬ 
ferent  instants  of  time  occupy  the  same  point  of  space  and 
different  points  of  space  occur  at  the  same  instant  of  time. 
Space  gives  continuity  to  the  successive  instants  of  time. 

Empirical  finite  existence  consists  of  a  series  or  hierarchy 
of  levels  of  “empirical  qualities.”  Each  level  is  built  up 
by  a  selection  and  complication  from  the  qualities  of  the 
next  lower  level.  This  complication  generates  a  new  sim¬ 
plicity  of  qualities — a  unique  group  of  qualities,  which  in 
turn  become  the  bodily  basis  for  the  next  higher  group  of 
qualities.  The  new  level  may  be  called  the  “soul,”  of 


RECENT  REALISM 


297 


which  the  bodily  basis  is  the  group  of  qualities  next  below 
from  which  the  “soul”  emerges.  The  “soul”  or  higher  set 
is  not  caused  by  the  lower  or  bodily  set,  but  ‘  ‘  emerges  ’  ’  from 
them.  The  empirical  levels  are,  in  order  of  their  complica¬ 
tion  and  emergence :  the  primary  qualities  of  pure  space- 
time  ;  the  secondary  qualities,  such  as  color,  sound,  taste ; 
the  qualities  of  life,  which  is  a  selection  from  a  larger 
whole  of  physico-chemical  processes ;  mind,  which  is  a 
selection  from  the  larger  whole  of  the  life  processes.  Life 
thus  emerges  from  matter,  and  mind  emerges  from  life. 
Life  and  mind  are  extended  and  in  time.  (Ibid.,  Vol.  II, 
p.  71.)  Everything  that  is  empirically  real,  is  a  complex  of 
space-time. 

Mind,  as  contemplated,  is  a  vital  process;  specifically 
it  is  a  process  of  innervation.  Mind,  as  enjoyed  innerva¬ 
tion,  is  consciousness.  Alexander  uses  the  peculiar  term 
“enjoyment”  for  mental  awareness,  or  what  is  commonly 
called  “introspection.”  Mind  is  identical  with  those  com¬ 
plex  neural  processes  from  which  consciousness  emerges. 
But  mind  is  not  an  epiphenomenon  or  by-product  of  the 
body ;  it  is  the  enjoyment  of  themselves  by  those  neural 
processes  which  are  mental.  Mind  consists  of  Acts;  it  is 
essentially  selective  and  attentive.  Mr.  Alexander’s  psy¬ 
chology  is  conational  or  volitional.  Even  purely  specula¬ 
tive  knowledge  is  for  him  delayed  or  suspended  conation 
or  action.  (Ibid.,  Vol.  II,  pp.  120,  121,  124,  125,  et  cetera.) 
Thus,  he  differs  radically  from  Russell,  who  reduces  the 
activity  of  mind  almost  to  a  vanishing  point. 

Knowledge  is  a  selection,  by  the  finite  mind,  of  some 
“aspects”  or  “perspectives”  of  the  real  world.  All  finite 
things  are  configurations  of  space-time.  The  objects,  which 
are  the  “aspects”  of  real  things  as  contemplated  by  a 
finite  mind,  are  selected  perspectives  of  the  real  things. 
The  sensa  or  sensory  appearances,  in  which  the  mind  con¬ 
templates  the  things  as  objects,  are  of  the  same  kind  as 


298 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


the  things  themselves.  All  that  the  sensory  appearance 
owes  to  mind  is  their  selection.  Illusions  “are  perspectives 
of  the  real  world  as  seen  bv  a  mind  in  abnormal  condition.” 
(Ibid.,  Vol.  II,  p.  216.)  The  illusory  object  is  nonmental; 
the  mind  chooses  illusions  from  the  world  of  reality.  (Ibid., 
Vol.  II,  p.  211  if.)  The  real  thing  is  the  totality  of  its 
perspectives.  (Ibid.,  Vol.  II,  p.  196.)  Thus  even  images 
and  memories  are  physical  objects ;  in  imagination  and 
memory  the  innervation  processes  are  contemplated.  (Ibid., 
Vol.  II,  pp.  90,  91,  94,  et  cetera.)  All  appearances  of  things 
are  thus  nonmental.  The  appearances  which  conform  to 
the  standard  of  social  normality,  for  example,  the  table  and 
the  teacup  as  they  appear  to  a  group  of  normal  persons, 
are  real  appearances ;  the  appearances  which  result  from 
the  influence  of  one  thing  on  another,  for  example,  an 
object  seen  in  an  artificial  light,  are  mere  appearances ;  the 
appearances  which  are  due  to  some  abnormality  in  the  per¬ 
cipient  in  his  relation  to  the  thing,  for  example,  color  blind¬ 
ness,  are  illusory  appearances. 

Truth,  we  saw,  is  belief  that  conforms  to  the  social 
standard  of  normality.  A  true  belief  is  one  in  which  the 
mind  believing  is  coherent  with  itself  and  with  other  finite 
minds.  So  it  is  with  all  other  values.  The  goodness  of  an 
act  or  disposition  is  the  coherence  of  the  volition  or  intent 
of  the  individual  person  with  the  conditions  of  personal 
satisfaction  by  normal  minds.  The  beauiy  of  an  object 
lies  in  the  coherence  of  its  parts,  as  felt  coherently  by  sev¬ 
eral  minds.  Thus  all  values  are  social.  In  the  self -coher¬ 
ence  of  the  individual  mind  and  its  coherence  with  other 
minds  is  the  home  of  values.  The  reality  of  values  is  the 
reality  of  socialized  minds.  Values  are,  then,  the  felt  rela¬ 
tions  of  minds  as  members  of  the  community  of  minds. 
Values  are  real,  since  mind  is  the  highest  finite  empirical 
reality  we  know. 

We  have  every  right  to  believe  that  there  are  higher 


RECENT  REALISM 


299 


empirical  qualities  than  finite  minds.  Deity  is  the  next 
higher  empirical  quality  than  mind.  An  infinite  or  per¬ 
fect  God  cannot  exist.  What  exists  is  the  infinite  universe ’s 
tendency  towards  deity.  God  is  the  ideal  God  in  embryo, 
always  becoming  deity  but  never  attaining  it.  (Ibid.,  Yol. 
II,  p.  365.)  The  striving  of  the  universe  towards  deity  is 
God.  God  must  include  mind,  which  we  may  say  is  his 
body,  since  the  whole  universe  is  the  body  of  God.  The 
values  which  our  minds  realize  are  the  materials  for  the 
making  of  deity.  Thus  God  is  a  metaphysical  name  for 
the  qualities-higher-than-finite-mind,  which,  presumably, 
emerge  in  the  endless  life  of  the  infinite  motion-stuff,  space- 
time.  Deity  is  the  coming  into  being  of  new  complications 
in  the  order  of  finite  qualities.  God  is  not  and  never  will 
be  a  perfect  existence ;  but  space-time  goes  on  enriching  its 
qualitative  wealth,  and  therein  lies  the  divinity  of  things. 

So  highly  elaborated  and  original  a  system  as  Alex¬ 
ander's  requires  a  more  thorough  examination  than  I  have 
space  for  here.  I  must  content  myself  with  suggesting, 
for  the  reader’s  consideration,  a  few  objections: 

1.  To  say  that  all  finite  existences  are  generated  from 
space-time  by  “ emergence”  or  1 1  complication, ”  and  to 
deny  that  this  is  materialism,  seems  to  me  an  equivoca¬ 
tion.  If  all  things  emerge  from  pure  space-time  or  motion- 
stuff,  and  if  “mind”  is  not  coeval  with  this  motion-stuff, 
then  not  only  living  beings  but  minds  are  mechanically 
caused. 

2.  How  can  a  mind  be  said  to  act  as  such,  if  it  be  merely 
the  awareness  of  a  neural  process?  The  neural  process  is 
physico-chemical,  and  therefore  the  real  agent  is  physical. 

3.  I  do  not  see  how  illusions  and  errors  of  all  sorts  can 
be  said  to  exist  physically,  unless  the  minds  which  hold 
them  as  true  be  merely  physical  complications?  Again  we 
have  the  same  fundamental  equivocation. 

4.  If  space-time  be  the  absolute,  I  do  not  see  by  what 


300 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


right  we  speak  of  one  set  of  qualities  as  “higher”  than 
others,  or  of  any  value  as  better  than  another. 

5.  The  striving  of  the  infinite  motion-stuff  towards  higher 
qualities  that  are  never  fully  realized  is  so  Pickwickian  a 
God  that,  I  think,  perhaps,  Alexander  would  further 
clearness  of  expression  by  expunging  the  terms  God  and 
Deity  from  his  system  altogether. 

6.  I  am  unable  to  see  that  the  whole  world  of  human 
and  spiritual  culture  can  be  regarded  as  merely  an  emer¬ 
gence  from,  or  complication  of,  so  thin  and  poor  a  motion- 
stuff  as  space-time. 

V.  Metaphysical  and  Religious  Implications  of 
Realism  and  Speculative  Idealism  Compared 

If  one  follow  the  excellent  suggestion  of  Dr.  Bosanquet 
and  employ  the  phrases,  “speculative  philosophy”  or 
“speculative  idealism,”  in  place  of  “absolute  idealism” 
or  “objective  idealism,”  to  designate  the  doctrine  that 
reality  is  a  coherent  whole  or  universe  to  whose  structure 
mind  affords  the  best  clue  available,  then  the  metaphysical 
realism  of  Dr.  Alexander  and  the  speculative  idealism 
which  is  best  represented  by  Dr.  Bosanquet  are  not  so 
far  apart  as  at  first  blush  they  seem.  For  Dr.  Bosanquet, 
like  Professors  Creighton,  Seth  Pringle-Pattison,  Mac- 
Kenzie,  and  others  (including  the  present  writer),  who 
have  deep  sympathies  with  the  idealism  of  Plato  and  Hegel, 
rejects  the  “mentalism”  of  Royce  and  Calkins  as  well  as 
that  of  Berkeley  and  Fichte.24  Both  Dr.  Alexander  and 
the  speculative  idealists,  as  I  shall  hereafter  call  them,  are 
agreed  that  reality  is  one  coherent  whole,  and  that  the 
most  comprehensive  and  adequate  criterion  of  the  truth 

24  The  reader  is  reminded  that  “mentalism”  means  the  doctrine 
that  nothing  really  exists  but  minds;  that  so-called  physical  world 
of  common  sense  is  but  the  appearance  of  minds  to  other  minds. 


RECENT  REALISM 


301 


of  any  human  apprehension  of  reality  is  the  coherence  of 
beliefs  with  the  facts  of  experience  and  with  one  another. 

Of  course  these  two  philosophies  differ  with  regard  to 
the  position  assigned  to  mind  in  the  total  scheme  of  things. 
Dr.  Alexander  denies  to  mind  that  privileged  position  in 
the  universe  which  the  speculative  idealist  assigns  to  it; 
but  it  is  noteworthy  that,  as  his  scheme  of  things  unfolds, 
from  mere  space-time  and  physical  qualities  to  the  richer 
empirical  qualities  of  reality,  mind  takes  up  more  and  more 
the  burden  of  the  tale.  Human  minds  and  their  values — 
beauty,  truth,  and  the  ethical  values  of  justice,  love,  and 
other  forms  of  goodness — are  empirical  realities  of  a  higher 
order  than  mere  animal  life ;  and  life,  in  turn,  is  a  higher 
order  of  reality  than  physical  qualities.  Furthermore, 
the  universe,  as  a  whole,  possesses  Deity,  in  its  everlasting 
movement  towards  the  realization  of  higher  empirical  qual¬ 
ities  and  values  than  those  which  finite  minds  enjoy;  and 
the  Deity  (I  would  prefer  to  say  “Divinity”)  of  the 
universe  includes,  while  it  transcends,  the  qualities  and 
values  of  human  minds.  It  seems  to  be  the  difficulty  of 
conceiving  the  concrete  character  of  that  which  is  higher 
than  human  mind,  and  yet  includes  it,  in  terms  of  mind, 
that  leads  Dr.  Alexander  to  deny  that  God  is  the  universal 
mind.  He  is  not  able  to  see  how  the  whole  range  of 
empirical  qualities  can  be  conceived  to  be  included  in  a 
universal  knower  and  will,  or  experience,  or  absolute  logos 
or  problem-solver.  A  self  for  him  is  essentially  finite  and 
conditioned.  The  limitation  of  mind  or  selfhood  to  a  con¬ 
ditioned  place  in  the  finite  empirical  order,  in  which  it 
rises  from,  and  is  the  enjoyment  or  awareness  of  itself  by, 
a  complication  of  neural  processes,  lead  Dr.  Alexander  to 
say  that  Deity  must  be  more  than  mind ;  since  finite  mind  is 
its  “body”  it  must  be  richer  than  this,  just  as  finite  mind 
is  richer  than  its  own  bodily  basis.  The  Deity  of  the  uni¬ 
verse,  which  is  space-time,  includes  and  transcends  all 


302 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


the  meanings  and  values  of  the  hierarchy  of  empirical  qual¬ 
ities,  from  color  and  form  up  to  sentient  life,  which  we 
contemplate ;  it  includes  and  transcends  all  the  mental  and 
social  values  which  we  enjoy. 

I  do  not  see  why  the  limitations  of  mind  in  ourselves 
should  prevent  us  from  concluding  that  the  Divinity,  which 
includes  and  carries  on  to  higher  levels  our  finite  lives 
and  their  values,  must  be  mind — the  immanent  spiritual 
community  and  ground  of  values,  which  in  its  perfection 
transcends  the  empirical  natural  and  social  orders.  Never¬ 
theless  it  is  clear  that  Dr.  Alexander’s  intent  is  that  reality 
has  many  degrees  of  meaning  and  value,  and  that  the  total 
significance  of  the  universe  is  always  much  richer  than  the 
best  that  human  beings  are  or  may  become.  The  universe 
for  him  has  Divinity,  and  is  worthy  to  be  held  in  reverence. 
It  is  the  all-inclusive,  omnipotent,  and  eternal  dynamic 
order,  in  which  all  values  are  realized  and  conserved.  Thus, 
his  position  approaches  very  closely  to  speculative  idealism. 
Moreover,  in  the  emphasis  he  puts  on  the  social  character  of 
values — truth  is  socially  normal  believing,  goodness  is 
socially  coherent  willing,  beauty  is  coherent  feeling — Dr. 
Alexander  approaches  the  idealistic  notion  of  God,  or  the 
Universal  Spirit,  as  the  spirit  of  the  beloved  community, 
the  principle  of  the  ideal  social  order.  Royce  has  made 
most  of  the  latter  motion,  but  it  seems  to  be  implied  in  all 
speculative  idealisms  from  Hegel  to  the  present. 

The  new  realists  in  general  are  not  materialists  or  me¬ 
chanists  ;  although  I  think  that  those  of  them  who  are 
neutral  monists,  if  they  followed  out  the  logic  of  their 
position  would  come  to  materialism.  For  the  neutral 
monist  is  in  a  position  of  very  unstable  logical  equilibrium. 
If  it  is  difficult  to  stand  long  on  one  leg,  as  the  mentalist 
and  the  materialist  try  to  do,  it  is  still  more  difficult  to 
remain  suspended  in  mid-air,  as  the  neutral  monist  tries 
to  do.  But  the  new  realists,  in  general,  not  only  affirm 


RECENT  REALISM 


303 


vigorously  the  reality  of  values  and  the  power  of  man, 
through  reason  and  imagination  to  achieve  higher  social 
and  spiritual  values ;  they  are  not,  as  a  rule,  hostile  to  the 
hypothesis  of  a  supreme  ground  of  values.  Professor  R.  B. 
Perry,  a  leading  American  new  realist,  gives  a  high  place  to 
the  claims  of  spiritual  religion  on  the  thought  and  alle¬ 
giance  of  men.25  Prof.  E.  G.  Spaulding,  in  his  carefully 
elaborated  book,  The  New  Rationalism ,  commits  himself 
more  specifically  to  a  belief  in  the  existence  of  God  as 
the  ground  or  totality  of  values.  He  says :  ‘  ‘  God  is  the 

totality  of  values  ’  ’ ;  He  is  ‘ 1  justice  and  truth  and  beauty, 
both  as  these  are  ‘  above  ’  our  world  and  as  they  are  in  it  ” ; 
“He  is  thus  both  transcendent  and  immanent. ” 26  He 
believes  in  “a  Power  that  works  not  only  side  by  side  with 
man,  but  also  in  him  and  through  him,  flowering  in  that 
freedom  which  is  given  to  his  reason  to  get  at  truth,  to  his 
emotions,  to  love  the  beautiful,  the  good,  and  the  true,  and 
to  detest  the  ugly,  the  evil,  and  the  false,  and  to  his  will  and 
manhood  to  engage  in  the  struggle.” 27  The  principal 
exception  to  this  attitude  is  Bertrand  Russell.  Religion 
for  him  is  possible  only  as  a  stoical  and  heroic  devotion  to 
the  highest  human  qualities,  the  cherishing  of  love  and  pity 
and  fellowship,  and  the  contemplation  of  the  beauty  and 
truth  created  by  the  human  reason  and  imagination ;  but 
all  in  this  in  the  face  of  a  brutal  and  unmeaning  universe. 
His  metaphysical  attitude  is  one  of  thoroughgoing  scien¬ 
tific  materialism ;  or,  rather,  w7as  up  to  the  publication  of 
his  Analysis  of  Mind.  Just  what  it  may  be  now  I  do 
not  know.  I  am  unable  to  find  any  inevitable  logical  con¬ 
nection  between  Russell’s  realism  in  theory  of  knowledge 
and  his  atheistic  materialism,  except  that  the  atomistic 


25  See  his  Present  Philosophical  Tendencies,  and  The  Moral 
Economy. 

26  E.  G.  Spaulding,  The  New  Rationalism ,  p.  517. 

27  Ibid.,  p.  521. 


304 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


pluralism  or  logical  atomism,  which  he  adopts  as  a  method, 
if  consistently  carried  out  would  negative  the  admission 
that  there  may  be  a  cosmical  ground  of  values.  No  one 
can  be  a  thoroughpaced  pluralist  and  find  any  place  in 
his  metaphysics  for  the  hypothesis  of  God  as  the  unity  and 
ground  of  human  values.  Hence,  while  a  realist  may  start 
from  extreme  pluralism  as  a  working  hypothesis,  he  has 
abandoned  it  as  soon  as  he  sets  up  the  notion  that  truth, 
goodness,  beauty,  and  whatsoever  other  values  there  may 
be,  have  a  cosmic  ground.  It  is  not  inconsistent  to  recog¬ 
nize  that  the  cosmic  ground  of  values  is  limited  in  some 
way,  and  that  there  is  an  evolution  in  which  values  are 
progressively  enhanced ;  in  other  words,  a  God  limited  by 
the  conditions  in  which  he  must  work  to  achieve  the  highest 
values  is  not  a  foolish  notion.  But  if,  as  the  extreme  plur¬ 
alist  holds,  reality  does  not  consist  of  a  whole  of  interre¬ 
lated  members,  the  idea  of  God  is  childish  nonsense.28 

VI.  A  Critique  of  Realism 

The  neorealistic  movement  arose  as  a  protest  and  criti¬ 
cism  against  subjectivistic  tendencies  manifest  in  idealism, 
sensationalistic  empiricism,  and  pragmatism.  Realism  pro¬ 
tests  against  the  narrow  humanism  manifested  in  certain 
forms  of  idealism,  as  well  as  in  pragmatism.  Realism 
stresses  the  objectivity  and  determinate  structure  of  nature 
and  of  reason  or  thought.  Nature  is  not  the  mere  reflec¬ 
tion  of  the  subject ;  nor  are  our  true  ideas  and  modes  of 
thinking  the  expression  of  our  individual,  or  even  our 
social,  wishes  and  aims.  There  is  a  real  and  determinate 
order  of  nature  and  a  real  and  determinate  order  of 
thought.  In  these  regards  the  position  of  the  realists  is 
wholly  sound  and  must  be  included  in  a  genuine  specula- 

28  See,  for  further  discussion  of  pluralism  and  the  idea  of  God, 
Chapter  XXIV,  Singularism  and  Pluralism. 


RECENT  REALISM 


305 


tive  philosophy.  Realism  also  criticizes  the  position  of 
absolute  or  objective  idealism  that  reality  must  be,  and 
is,  a  coherent  and  harmonious  system  or  relational  organ¬ 
ization,  the  clue  to  which  is  to  be  found  in  the  nature  of 
mind.  The  absolute  idealist  argues  that  the  structural 
texture  of  reality  and  of  mind  are  identical  in  character 
and,  therefore,  no  truth  is  absolutely  true  and  no  finite 
reality  absolutely  real,  except  when  referred  to  and 
taking  their  due  places  in  the  absolute  systems  of  truth 
and  reality.  The  realist  replies  that,  from  this  standpoint, 
since  we  do  not  know,  and  indeed,  cannot  know,  in  detail 
the  character  of  these  supposed  absolute  systems,  every 
specific  proposition  which  we  believe  to  be  true  is  thereby 
cast  in  doubt  and  we  have  no  means  of  knowing  what  its 
ultimate  status  may  be.  He  asserts,  on  the  contrary,  that 
we  may  know  directly  by  perception  and  intuition  the  truth 
of  some  propositions.  The  absolute  idealist  replies  that  we 
can  know  the  general  character  of  the  system  of  reality 
and,  therefore,  can  tell,  approximately,  the  position  of 
some  of  our  human  truths  in  it. 

The  realist  is  right,  it  seems  to  me,  in  holding  that  we 
can  know  some  truth  directly,  by  reflective  intuition,  and 
that,  for  us,  these  truths  are  absolutely  true.  We  have 
such  true  propositions  in  pure  logic  and  mathematics ;  per¬ 
haps,  there  are  some  ethical  values  which  are  absolutely 
valid,  too.  If  we  had  to  wait  until  we  knew  the  whole 
nature  of  reality,  even  though  only  in  outline,  before  we 
could  be  sure  that  we  had  any  truth,  we  should  be  in  a 
very  bad  fix.  On  the  other  hand,  the  most  comprehensive 
test  of  truth  seems  to  me  to  be  the  coherence  of  intuitively 
known  propositions,  and  their  deduced  consequences,  with 
one  another,  and  with  the  inductively  established  interpre¬ 
tations  of  perceptual  experience.  Progress  in  any  field  of 
knowledge,  and,  consequently  in  the  whole  field  of  knowl¬ 
edge,  consists  in  weaving  our  percentions  of  fact  into  bodies 


306 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


of  conceptual  systems  consistent  with  the  fundamental  log¬ 
ical  laws  of  identity,  coherence,  and  sufficient  reason.  In  so 
far  as  we  succeed  thereby  in  knowing  and  in  controlling 
nature,  this  success  implies  that  nature  and  human  nature 
are  reciprocating  members  in  one  universal  order  or  system. 
It  makes  no  difference  whether  we  say  that  the  structure 
of  reality  corresponds  with  or  reflects  the  structure  of  mind, 
or  that,  since  mind  is  a  live  focus  of  reality,  the  structure 
of  mind  must  reflect  or  embody  the  structure  of  reality. 
Whichever  side  we  start  from  we  must  come  to  the  other. 
So  far  as  reality  is  intelligible,  it  must  be  coherent.  So  far 
as  mind  expands  in  rationality  and  practical  control  of 
its  data,  it  does  so  by  taking  the  structure  of  reality  into 
itself  and  thus  becoming  more  rational.  The  universe  is 
a  living  and  dynamic  whole  which  comes  to  awareness  of 
itself  in  mind.  Minds  are  effective  centers  in  reality,  in 
so  far  as  they  become  alive  to  the  fact  that  their  function 
is  to  grasp  the  lines  of  force  which  center  in  them  and 
radiate  from  them  as  awaring  members  of  the  whole. 

The  ever  recurring  controversies  and  misconceptions 
which  arise  from  the  equivocal  meanings  of  the  terms 
“idealism”  and  “realism”  suggest  that  it  might  be  better 
to  discard  their  use  altogether,  and  to  call  our  standpoint 
“rationalistic”  or  “organizational  experimentalism.  ” 
Briefly,  this  standpoint  involves  the  following  propositions: 
(1)  Things  perceived  are  selected  and  organized  groupings 
of  sense-qualities  in  relation ;  such  relations  as  spatial,  tem¬ 
poral,  numerical,  qualitative  (degrees  of  likeness  and  un¬ 
likeness),  quantitative  (equality,  greater,  less,  etc.),  dynam¬ 
ical  (physical,  purposive).  (2)  In  knowing,  true  relations 
are  discovered,  not  made  by  the  mind ;  in  willing,  man  does, 
to  a  limited  extent,  make  new  relations.  (3)  The  known 
world,  as  a  complex  of  things  and  events  in  relation,  in¬ 
volves  three  factors:  (a)  the  mind,  with  its  definite  struc¬ 
ture,  history  and  interests;  (b)  the  physical  or  “objective” 


RECENT  REALISM 


307 


grounds  and  perception ;  these  I  conceive  to  be  energy-com¬ 
plexes;  (c)  the  central  nervous  system  and  the  sense  organs, 
which  are  at  once  parts  of  the  physical  order  and  the 
immediate  basis  of  the  mental  processes  of  perception,  et 
cetera,  and  hence  are  the  intermediating  links  between  the 
mind  and  the  rest  of  the  physical  world.  (4)  Percepts  are 
not  copies  of  things  but  partial  and  fragmentary  aspects 
or  ‘  ‘  views  ’  ’  of  the  real  external  world  selected  by  the  mind 
and  the  sensory  system.  (5)  The  mind  is  the  “ ultimate’ ’ 
active  selective  and  analytic-synthetic  principle  which  dis¬ 
covers  and  takes  note  of  qualities-in-relation,  and  which 
constructs  and  organizes  a  larger  context  of  reality,  in 
which  it  sets  and  interprets  the  immediate  data  of  ex¬ 
perience.  The  relation  of  a  perceived  thing  or  event,  or 
even  a  scientific  law,  to  reality  is  that  of  a  partial  selected 
and  interpreted  aspect  or  fragment  of  an  indefinitely  com¬ 
plex  totality  of  things,  processes,  qualities,  and  relations. 
Reality  involves  much  more  than  any  experience,  but  that 
“more”  is  a  construction  by  the  human  mind  from  the 
structure  of  actual  experience  and  the  nature  of  the  con¬ 
struction  is  determined  by  the  joint  natures  of  the  ex¬ 
perienced  reality  and  of  the  mind’s  own  structure.  6.  In 
error  and  illusion  the  mind  misinterprets  or  places  in  its 
wrong  setting  some  bit  of  experience  or  generalization 
from  experience.  It  may  either  fail  to  determine  and 
analyze  the  data  correctly  or  it  may  fail  to  set  the  data  in 
the  right  connections  with  other  items  of  reality.  There 
can  be  no  unreal  experiences,  only  untrue,  that  is,  wrongly 
related,  experiences. 

References 

Alexander,  Samuel,  Space ,  Time  and  Deity ;  Natural  Piety , 
in  Hibbert  Journal,  Yol.  XX,  pp.  609-621. 

Bosanquet,  B.,  The  Meeting  of  Extremes  in  Contemporary  Phi¬ 
losophy. 

Broad,  C.  D.,  Perception,  Physics  and  Reality. 


308 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


Holt,  E.  B.,  The  Concept  of  Consciousness. 

Laird,  John,  A  Study  in  Realism ;  Problems  of  the  Self. 
Leighton,  J.  A.,  Man  and  the  Cosmos ,  Chapters  IV-VIII,  XVIII- 
XXI  and  XXIV. 

*  Marvin,  W.  T.,  A  First  Book  in  Metaphysics ;  The  History  of 

European  Philosophy,  Chapter  XXVII. 

Moore,  G.  E.,  Ethics;  Principia  Ethica. 

*  Perry,  R.  B.,  and  others,  The  New  Realism. 

*  Perry,  R.  B.,  Present  Philosophical  Tendencies. 

*  Rogers,  A.  K.,  English  and  American  Philosophy  since  1800, 

Chapter  VI,  Sec.  3,  and  Chapter  VIII. 

*  Russell,  Bertrand,  The  Analysis  of  Mind;  Mysticism  and 

Logic;  Our  Knowledge  of  the  External  World.  (Title  on 
cover  in  American  Edition,  Scientific  Method  in  Philosophy) ; 
The  Problems  of  Philosophy. 

Spaulding,  The  New  Rationalism. 

Essays  in  Critical  Realism,  by  D.  Drake,  A.  0.  Lovejoy,  A.  K. 

Rogers,  G.  Santayana,  R.  W.  Sellars,  and  C.  A.  Strong. 
Hobhouse,  L.  T.,  The  Theory  of  Knowledge ;  Development  and 
Purpose. 

Santayana,  G.,  The  Life  of  Reason;  Egotism  in  German 
Philosophy. 

Sellars,  R.  VV.,  Critical  Realism;  The  Essentials  of  Philosophy. 


CHAPTER  XXI 


TEMPORALISM 

Temporalism  is,  in  broadest  terms,  that  philosophical 
doctrine  which  insists  on  the  reality  and  significance  of 
the  time  process.  In  its  extreme  form  it  asserts  that  all 
being  is  becoming.  Thus,  Heraclitus  was  a  temporalist. 
Temporalism  has  gained  ground  steadily  since  the  begin¬ 
ning  of  the  nineteenth  century  when  Hegel’s  historical 
idealism,  with  its  strongly  temporalistic  coloring,  appeared. 
Temporalism,  however,  received  its  greatest  impetus  from 
the  rise  and  spread  of  the  theory  of  evolution.  Philoso¬ 
phers  otherwise  so  diverse  as  Herbert  Spencer,  Josiah 
Royce,  James  Ward,  F.  Nietzsche,  A.  Fouillee  (a  French 
idealistic  evolutionist),  Henri  Bergson  and  William  James, 
John  Dewey  and  S.  Alexander,  are  all,  in  some  sense, 
evolutionists. 


I.  Bergson’s  Temporalism 

In  this  chapter  I  shall  treat  of  Bergson  and  James  as 
the  major  prophets  of  a  temporalistic  philosophy.  Berg¬ 
son’s  great  influence  has  come  chiefly  from  his  bold  and 
persuasive  interpretation  of  evolution  as  the  endlessly 
creative  psychical  process.  His  doctrines  of  the  relations 
of  space  and  time,  mind  and  body,  intelligence  and  intui¬ 
tion,  are  all  contributory  to  his  theory  of  evolution.  He 
has  promulgated  and  carried  out,  with  great  consistency 

and  elaboration,  the  doctrine  that  reality  is  duration  and 

309 


310 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


that  duration  is  identical  with  the  creative  activity  of 
psychical  life. 

Setting  out,  in  his  first  book,  Time  and  Free  Will,1 
from  the  contrast  between  the  extensive  or  spatial  order 
and  the  intensive  or  temporal  order  he  builds  his  system 
of  metaphysics  thereon.  He  makes  liberal  and  telling  use 
of  the  facts  of  immediate  experience  and  the  theories 
of  the  special  sciences. 

The  space  order  is  the  realm  of  pure  quantity,  of 
homogeneous  elements.  All  quantitative  measurement 
consists  in  reducing  that  which  is  measured  to  similar  units 
spread  out  in  space.  To  count  any  multiplicity  is  to 
picture  it  as  spread  out  over  space.  We  count  by  putting 
the  units  side  by  side.  For  example,  to  count  the  suc¬ 
cessive  strokes  of  a  bell  one  imagines  them  as  extended  in 
space.  But  this  entire  conception  of  a  pure  homogeneous 
space  order  is  an  abstraction  which  has  been  fashioned 
by  the  human  intellect  as  an  instrument  by  which  the  self 
can  grasp  the  similarities  or  repetitions  in  events  and  thus, 
by  foreseeing ,  in  part ,  the  future,  can  deliberately  plan  its 
future  conduct.  In  reality  there  is  no  pure  homogeneity , 
no  repetition  of  absolute  similars.  In  reality  there  is  only 
an  endless  succession  of  heterogeneous  or  different  states 
of  duration.  Reality  is  incessant  mobility,  action,  life. 
In  reality  there  are  no  two  moments  which  are  absolutely 
alike.  The  reality  which  is  life  or  mind  energy  is  a  cease¬ 
lessly  creative  process  of  differing  events  or  durations, 
which  interpenetrate  one  another  through  memory.  Age 
cannot  wither  nor  custom  stale  the  infinite  variety  of 
events  in  the  onward  movement  of  the  vital  impetus  ( l 9 elan 
vital). 

The  conventional  clock  time,  conceived  to  be  an  abso¬ 
lutely  even  or  rhythmical  flow,  is  a  bastard  time,  pictured 


1  French  title,  Essai  sur  les  Donnees  Immediates  de  la  Conscience. 


TEMPORALISM 


311 


in  terms  of  homogeneous  space,  in  order  that  the  intellect 
may  count  and  measure  its  successive  moments.  Dura¬ 
tion  or  real  time  is  life’s  experience  of  its  own  creative 
process.  Each  self,  each  pulsating  fragment  of  the  vital 
impetus,  has  its  own  unique  experience  of  duration  or 
temporal  flow.  And  in  every  self  the  successive  moments 
of  its  duration  are  severally  unique ;  by  reason  of  memory, 
which  is  a  unique  property  of  the  self,  its  successive  mo¬ 
ments,  as  they  pass,  are  conserved  and  absorbed  in  the 
enduring,  growing,  or  self-creating  reality  which  is  the 
vital  impetus,  the  essence  of  every  self.  “Life  is  the  in¬ 
visible  progress  of  the  past  gnawing  into  the  future.” 
“There  are  no  two  identical  moments  in  the  life  of  a 
self.  A  consciousness  which  could  experience  two  identical 
moments  would  be  a  consciousness  without  memory.  It 
would  die  and  be  born  again  continually.”  Thus  the  only 
real  continuity  is  that  of  memory.  ( Introduction  to  Meta¬ 
physics ,  translated  by  F.  E.  Hulme,  p.  13.)  We  think 
that  there  are  a  space  and  a  time  of  which  all  the  parts 
are  similar,  and  which  can  be  infinitely  extended  and  in¬ 
finitely  divided.  But  this  space  and  this  time  are  not 
realities;  they  are  but  abstract  mental  diagrams,  framed 
by  the  intellect  for  the  purpose  of  perceiving  continuities 
and  uniformities  in  nature  and  the  self.  The  intellect  i-s 
a  tool  for  operating  on  solids  arranged  side  by  side  in 
space.  All  its  logic  is  modelled  on  geometry.  The  uses  of 
the  intellect  are  limited  to  the  reduction  of  the  real  quali¬ 
tative  diversity  of  life  to  equations  of  identity.  Thus  it 
sums  up  the  never  ending  variety  of  actual  changes  in 
terms  of  the  quantitative  rearrangement  of  changeless  units. 
Thus  the  goal  of  the  intellect’s  apprehension  of  reality  is 
to  conceive  it  all  as  a  spatial  mechanism.  But  life  belongs 
to  an  entirely  different  category. 

It  follows  that  psychical  processes  are  not  in  themselves 
measurable.  And,  with  regard  to  the  critical  problem  of 


312 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


free  will,  Bergson  argues  that  the  common  fallacy  of  physi¬ 
cal  determinism  and  psychological  determinism  lies  in  the 
transformation  of  the  actual  creative,  living  process,  which 
we  are,  into  a  dead  mechanism.  Since  life  is  creative  psy¬ 
chical  process  and  this  is  real  duration,  no  one  could  pre¬ 
dict  what  another  self  would  do  unless  he  were  that  other ; 
and  even  thus,  in  important  crisis,  when  the  whole  self 
acts,  he  could  not  predict  his  own  action,  since  at  the  very 
moment  of  choice  the  creative  urge  of  the  self  is  issuing  in  a 
new  fact.  ‘  ‘  To  conceive  all  the  conditions  as  given  is,  when 
dealing  with  concrete  duration,  to  place  one’s  self  at  the 
very  moment  at  which  the  act  is  being  performed.”  ( Time 
and  Free  Will,  p.  220.)  “The  free  act  takes  place  in  the 
time  which  is  flowing,  not  in  the  time  which  has  already 
flown.”  (Ibid.,  p.  221.)  It  is  plausible,  after  the  event, 
to  say  that  a  man  could  not  have  done  otherwise,  being 
what  he  was,  because  we  infer  what  he  was  from  what  he 
did;  whereas,  in  truth,  what  he  did,  especially  in  a  great 
crisis,  was  an  act  of  creation,  by  virtue  of  which  he  became 
to  some  extent  a  new  being.  The  self  is  not  determined  to 
act  by  sympathy,  aversion,  love,  loyalty,  et  cetera ;  as 
though  these  were  forces  which  acted  on  the  self  from 
without.  The  self  is  what  it  is,  and  it  becomes  what  it 
becomes,  by  giving  creative  expression  to  the  moral  atti¬ 
tudes  signified  by  such  terms. 

We  are  free  when,  and  in  the  degree  in  which,  our 
acts  emanate  from  our  entire  personality.  Until  a  decision 
is  made  action  is  indeterminate  and  accurate  prevision  im¬ 
possible.  Psychical  causation  differs  from  mechanical 
causation  in  two  respects :  ( 1 )  In  psychical  causation  the 
cause  and  the  effect  are  not  mathematical  equivalents.  (2) 
In  psychical  causation  there  is  a  feeling  of  effort  in  passing 
from  the  idea  of  action  to  the  action.  Mechanical  causa¬ 
tion  is  but  the  superficial  relation  between  events  as  seen 
by  the  intellect.  Retrospective  analysis  transforms  a  living 


TEMPORALISM 


313 


progress  into  a  dead  thing.  Psychical  causation  is  the 
deeper  reality  immediately  lived  and  experienced.  The 
more  we  live  on  the  surface  of  life  the  more  adequate  me¬ 
chanical  causation  is  to  explain  our  actions  though  it  is 
never  wholly  adequate;  the  deeper  and  fuller  we  live 
out  our  vocations,  as  creative  selves,  the  freer  we  are. 

In  his  second  principal  work,  Matter  and  Memory 
(French,  Matiere  et  Memoire),  Bergson  applies  the  above 
principles  to  the  solution  of  the  mind-body  problem.  Matter 
and  mind  differ  in  degree,  not  in  kind.  Pure  matter  would 
be  inert  homogeneous  space  ;  pure  mind  would  be  absolutely 
inextended  quality,  pure  heterogeneity.  The  self  moves 
incessantly  between  these  two  extremes,  wdiich  have  no 
existence  as  such  but  are  mere  limiting  concepts.  The  hu¬ 
man  body  is  a  center  of  action  living  in  relation  to  other  cen¬ 
ters  of  action.  Bergson’s  conception  of  body  is  thoroughly 
dynamic.  Perception  is  a  means  of  action ,  not  of  theoreti¬ 
cal  knowledge.  It  does  not  tell  us  what  matter  is  like;  it 
only  furnishes  images  of  surrounding  things,  as  a  guide  to 
the  outer  action  of  our  own  bodies  therewith.  ((I  call 
matter  the  aggregate  of  images,  and  perception  of  matter 
these  same  images  referred  to  the  eventual  action  of  one 
particular  image,  my  body.”  ( Matter  and  Memory,  p.  8.) 
Realism  and  idealism  both  err  in  assuming  that  perception 
has  a  wholly  speculative  interest,  that  it  is  the  mental  rep¬ 
resentative  of  an  external  world ;  whereas  perception  is  the 
lowest  form  of  intellectual  activity  and  is  but  a  means  to 
action.  {Ibid.,  p.  17.)  Matter  is  precisely  what  it  appears 
to  be.  {Ibid.,  p.  80.)  “ There  is  in  matter  something  more 

than,  but  not  something  different  from,  that  which  is  actu¬ 
ally  given  in  perception.”  {Ibid.,  p.  78.) 

The  brain  is  a  kind  of  central  telephonic  exchange,  whose 
office  is  to  allow  communication,  or  to  delay  it,  between  the 
mind  and  the  surrounding  world.  {Ibid.,  p.  19.)  The 
more  choices  open  to  a  living  being  the  richer  its  percep- 


314 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


tions  The  self,  endowed  with  a  power  of  creative  choice, 
cuts  out,  within  the  material  world,  the  center  of  action 
which  is  called  its  own  body.  (Ibid.,  p.  45.)  In  the  body, 
which  is  a  system  of  images,  the  central  image,  the  brain, 
is  an  instrument  of  action. 

Actual  perception  is  a  fusion,  in  varying  degrees,  of 
percepts  and  memory  images.  The  extended  and  more  or 
less  inert  and  homogeneous  world,  which  we  perceive,  is 
so  perceived  because  our  sensations  are  overlaid  with 
memory  images,  retained  and  recalled,  since  they  guide  us 
to  action  by  emphasizing  similarities  between  present  and 
past.  The  survival  of  the  past  through  memory  is  a  condi¬ 
tion  of  our  survival  and  welfare. 

There  are  two  kinds  of  memory :  1.  Motor  memory, 

which  is  exemplified  by  every  instance  of  our  employment 
of  a  habit  or  skill  acquired  through  repetition ;  for  exam¬ 
ple,  walking  or  talking.  This  sort  of  memory  depends  on 
the  formation  of  motor  diagrams  or  mechanisms  in  the 
brain.  2.  On  the  other  hand,  when  we  recall,  recognize,  and 
place  distinct  events  in  our  past;  when,  for  example,  we 
recall  when  and  where  we  first  saw  the  young  goddess,  our 
first  love,  swim  into  our  ken,  we  have  a  case  of  pure  memory 
— of  the  revival  and  identification  of  images  from  the  past. 
Since  images  cannot  be  stored  up  in  enormous  numbers  in 
the  brain,  and  even  if  they  were  we  could  not  pick  out  and 
recognize  instantaneously  the  correct  one  of  the  quadrillion 
or  so  there,  pure  memory  is  independent  of  the  brain. 
The  power  of  retaining,  restoring,  and  identifying  the 
images  from  our  past,  each  in  its  individiial  flavor  and 
setting,  is  a  function  of  pure  spirit  or  mind.  Bergson  en¬ 
forces  this  doctrine  with  a  very  acute  use  of  cases  of 
aphasia  and  amnesia  to  show  that  we  cannot  localize  pure 
memory  in  the  brain.  In  fact  he  holds  that  the  past  and 
present  are  not  in  the  brain ;  the  brain  is  in  them,  since  past 
and  present  are  functions  of  mind 


TEMPORALISM 


315 


Our  lives  oscillate  between  the  planes  of  pure  action  and 
of  pure  dreaming.  If  we  led  only  dream  lives  we  should 
be  living  in  pure  memory  alone ;  and  our  lives  would  con¬ 
sist  simply  of  the  endless  phantasmagoria  of  individual 
images.  If  we  lived  in  action  alone  we  should  be  mere 
unconscious  machines  and  the  passive  creatures  of  our 
environments.  We  oscillate  between  the  two.  In  action, 
only  so  much  of  our  past  is  brought  to  bear  on  present 
perception  as  will  enable  us  to  act  successfully.  The  whole 
of  our  past  psychical  life  conditions  our  present  state, 
but  we  select  only  so  much  of  it  as  we  need  to  facilitate 
action.  (Ibid.,  p.  191.)  Pure  memory  is  essentially  de¬ 
tached  from  the  life  of  action ;  it  is  reverie.  When  action 
is  imperative  pure  memory  is  latent  and  in  abeyance.  The 
past  has  not  ceased  to  exist ;  it  has  only  ceased  to  be 
useful.  (Ibid.,  p.  193.)  Our  ordinary  consciousness  em¬ 
bodies  the  materiality  of  our  lives,  the  urgency  of  action. 
Our  body  is  that  part  of  our  representation  which  is  ever 
being  born  anew,  for  the  purpose  of  action.  True  memory 
“  retains  and  ranges  alongside  of  each  other  all  our  states 
in  the  order  in  which  they  occur,  leaving  to  each  its  place 
and  consequently  marking  its  date.”  (Ibid.,  p.  195.) 
When  action  is  not  urgent  pure  memory  surges  up  and  we 
live  almost  as  pure  spirits.  But  it  is  our  body  which 
keeps  our  spirit  in  connection  with  the  external  world, 
and  thus  gives  sanity  and  poise  to  life.  Let  the  fusion  be¬ 
tween  the  mind  and  the  external  world,  which  the  nervous 
system  mediates,  be  relaxed  and  dreams  and,  at  the  extreme, 
insanity,  occur. 

Bergson  concludes  that  the  difficulties  of  the  mind-body 
problem,  in  its  traditional  formulations  are  due  to  regard¬ 
ing  the  physical  and  mental  as  representations  or  dupli¬ 
cates,  the  one  of  the  other.  He  treats  them  as  differing 
only  in  degree .  There  is  no  pure  space ;  there  is  only  an  ex¬ 
tended  mobile  continuum  in  which  we  carve  out  our  bodies 


316 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


as  centers  of  action.  Memory  is  spirit,  but  spirit  must 
act,  and  therefore  carves  out  a  body  from  the  stream  of 
incessant  becoming  which  is  the  real  world  or  nature. 
In  nature  there  are  all  sorts  of  degrees  of  extension  and 
tension,  in  inverse  ratio  to  one  another.  The  body  is  a 
high-tension  selecting  and  condensing  medium,  by  which 
pure  spirit,  which  is  pure  inextensive  tension,  is  able  to 
divide  and  subdivide  extension  by  the  use  of  intellect,  and 
to  subtilize  it  in  the  affections.  The  spirit  effects  the  con¬ 
traction  of  the  less  heterogeneous  or  more  extended  and 
physical  into  the  more  heterogeneous,  or  vital  and  spiritual, 
by  degrees  of  tension.  Thus  Bergson  thinks  he  has  bridged 
the  chasm  between  mind  and  body  by  the  notion  of  de¬ 
grees,  in  inverse  ratio,  of  extension  and  tension. 

In  his  third  and  most  popular  work,  Creative  Evolution , 
Bergson  applies  the  fundamental  ideas  worked  out  in  the 
two  previous  works  to  the  theory  of  evolution. 

After  an  acute  criticism  of  both  radical  mechanism 
and  radical  finalism  or  teleology  as  involving  the  same 
error — that  the  whole  of  reality  is  eternally  given  all 
at  once,  and  that  the  history  of  the  world  is  but  the  in¬ 
evitable  unfolding  of  this  whole — Bergson  develops  his 
own  theory  that  evolution  is  a  continuously  creative  vital 
and  psychical  process.  The  true  reality  is  the  vital  im¬ 
petus  (l’ elan  vital)  ;  it  is  the  creative  current  of  being,  the 
urge  towards  increase  of  individuality.  But  there  is  a 
counter  current,  the  downward  tendency  towards  inertia, 
sameness,  immobility,  exemplified  in  habit.  This  is  matter ; 
life  and  matter  are  thus  two  opposing  tendencies,  the  one 
driving  towards  creativity  and  individuality,  the  other 
dragging  it  down  towards  immobility  and  mechanism 
which  is  death. 

I  am  unable  to  make  out  what  is  Bergson’s  theory  of 
the  origin  of  matter.  He  assumes  it  as  an  original  datum, 
when  he  is  depicting  the  nature  of  the  vital  impetus  as 


TEMPORALISM 


317 


unceasing  effort  to  mount  higher  against  the  current  of 
matter.  At  other  times  he  speaks  as  though  matter  and 
the  intellect  have  been  cut  out,  by  an  identical  process, 
from  a  primal  stuff  that  contained  both.  Intellect  and 
matter,  he  says,  have  been  evolved  together.  Matter  is 
spatialized  intellect.  But  again  intellect  was  evolved  by 
the  vital  impetus,  as  a  means  for  successful  action  on  mat¬ 
ter.  Therefore  intellect  presupposes  matter. 

Matter  and  Intellect  have  “  progressively  adapted  them¬ 
selves  to  one  another  in  order  to  attain  at  last  a  common 
form”  ( Creative  Evolution,  p.  206).  This  common  form 
is  a  homogeneous  and  static  whole  of  parts  juxtaposed  in 
space.  Essentially,  Matter  is  a  downward  flux,  “a  reality 
that  is  unmaking  itself” ;  Life  is  an  upward  flux,  “a  reality 
that  is  making  itself”  (Ibid.,  p.  248).  Life  and  Matter 
are  opposing  currents  in  the  total  stream  of  Becoming. 
Life  cannot  create  absolutely,  because  it  is  confronted  with 
matter  (Ibid.,  p.  250).  Life  in  itself  is  an  immensity  of 
potentiality,  in  contact  with  matter  it  is  limited  and  be¬ 
comes  an  impetus  (Ibid.,  p.  258).  The  increase  of  materi¬ 
ality,  the  expansion  of  the  current  that  is  unmaking  itself, 
takes  place  through  the  relaxation  of  tension,  through  a 
detension  which  produces  extension.  Thus  matter  extends 
itself  in  space,  without  being  absolutely  extended  therein 
(Ibid.,  pp.  202ff).  The  more  inert  and  spread-out  the 
downward  movement  becomes,  the  more  materialized  it 
becomes;  for  space  and  matter  are  identical.  Because  of 
the  initial  duality  of  movement,  the  vital  impetus,  in  order 
to  survive  and  move  upstream  against  the  pull  of  the  down¬ 
ward  current,  evolved  intellect.  The  latter  has  helped  the 
vital  impetus  to  survive  and  grow,  but  at  a  great  cost. 
For  intellect  has  rendered  materiality  more  material,  that 
is,  more  spatial.  At  the  same  time  it  has  made  the  vital 
impetus,  whose  servant  it  is,  more  spatial.  For  the  intel¬ 
lect  has  suffered  from  a  natural  inability  to  understand  its 


318 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


master,  life.  Even  intuition  had  to  shrink  into  the  narrow 
forms  of  the  instincts,  in  order  that  the  impetus  might 
make  headway. 

This  mechanization,  this  shrivelling  up  and  ossification 
of  the  vital  impetus,  through  its  intellectualization,  is  re¬ 
flected  in  philosophy  and  science,  from  the  ancient  Greeks 
to  the  present  time.  The  movement  of  Greek  philosophy, 
from  Zeno  the  Eleatic  to  Plotinus,  with  its  elevation  of  the 
one  eternal  and  changeless  Reality  above  the  many  temporal 
Phenomena,  is  the  effect  of  the  intellect’s  inveterate  habit 
of  taking  static  snap-shot  views  of  the  ceaselessly  mobile 
and  ever  heterogeneous  flux  of  real  Duration.  The  Ideas 
or  Forms  of  Plato,  the  Forms  or  Entelechies  of  Aristotle, 
are  intellectual  snap-shots  of  the  ever-moving  reality  in 
which  there  is  constant  change  of  form.  The  mechanistic 
concepts  of  modern  science,  and  of  such  a  philosophy  as 
Spencer’s,  are  of  the  same  origin. 

In  brief,  Bergson  holds — (1)  That  reality  is  a  perpetual 
flux  of  two  opposing  currents,  one  of  which  becomes  the 
world  of  living  organisms  and  the  other  becomes,  or  tends 
to  become,  the  world  of  inert  space-occupying  matter. 
(2)  In  order  that  life  may  persist  and  increase,  it  must  be¬ 
come  materialized.  In  doing  this  it  loses  something  of  its 
original  spontaneity  and  creativeness ;  it  becomes  mechan¬ 
ized  as  intellect  and  narrowed  as  instinct.  (3)  There  is  in 
man  vestiges  of  a  power,  by  developing  which  he  may 
restore,  enlarge,  and  deepen  the  lost  sense  of  life,  and  may 
even  conquer  matter  and  put  on  freedom  and  immortality. 
This  power  is  Intuition — but  that  is  another  story.  Mean¬ 
time,  if  the  reader  finds  himself  perplexed  as  to  the  respec¬ 
tive  places  and  relations  of  matter ,  space  and  intellect  in 
Bergson’s  philosophy,  I  confess  I  share  his  perplexity,  and 
can  only  refer  him  to  the  original  works.  How  a  down¬ 
ward  current,  not  in  space,  extends  itself  in  space,  I  do 
not  understand.  Nor  do  I  see  why  it  should  be  necessary 


TEMPORALISM 


319 


for  the  vital  impetus  to  fabricate  the  intellect  to  aggravate 
the  situation  in  which  the  impetus  already  finds  itself,  by 
making  matter  more  spatial  and  imprisoning  life  more 
completely  in  it ;  since  the  impetus  has  produced  intellect 
in  order  to  free  itself  from  this  downward  current.  The 
liberator  seems,  in  this  case,  only  to  have  made  the  prison 
bars  more  secure. 

The  main  types  of  living  organisms  are  divergent  lines 
of  evolution,  struck  out  by  the  vital  impetus  in  its  efforts 
to  surmount  the  downward  current  of  matter.  The  whole 
history  of  life  is  a  cosmic  obstacle  race.  The  vital  impetus 
has  tried,  here  one  device,  and  there  another.  Thus  the 
evolution  of  life  is  the  product  neither  of  mechanical 
necessity  nor  of  the  necessity  imposed  by  a  single  pre¬ 
determined  plan.  The  main  divergent  lines  of  evolution 
are  expressed  in  the  following  diagram: 


Vertebrates  culminating  in  man  with  intellect 
his  chief  guide  to  action. 


Thus  the  evolutionary  process  is  like  a  tree  with  a  few 
branches  shooting  out  at  irregular  intervals.  Life  is  a 


320 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


current  sent  through  matter.2  The  whole  history  of  life 
has  been  the  effort  of  consciousness  to  raise  matter.  There 
are  two  orders — the  physical  order  which  is  automatic  or 
mechanical,  and  the  vital  order  which  is  voluntary  or  psy¬ 
chical.  Life  is  a  reality  which  is  making  itself  in  a  reality 
which  is  unmaking  itself.3  In  the  advancement  of  the  vital 
impetus  two  things  are  necessary:  (1)  a  gradual  accumula¬ 
tion  of  explosive  energy ;  this  is  achieved  in  plants  through 
the  chlorophvllian  function;  (2)  an  elastic  canalization  of 
this  energy  in  variable  and  indeterminable  directions. 

The  three  divergent  lines  of  animal  life  represent  the 
three  main  experiments  of  the  vital  impetus.  The  sessile 
animals,  such  as  the  zoophytes,  represent  a  kind  of  plant 
life,  a  failure  of  the  vital  impetus  to  get  forward.  The 
second  main  line  of  animal  evolution  has  reached  its  high¬ 
est  achievement  in  the  arthropoda,  particularly  in  the  in- 
secta.  Here  we  find  mobile  animals  adjusting  themselves 
to  the  environment  by  instincts  or  inherited  reflexes  which 
display  a  marvellous  degree  of  accuracy.  Instincts  are  fine, 
highly  specialized  tools.  Bergson  cites  particularly  the 
Ilymenoptera  which  sting  their  live  prey  and  bring  them, 
paralyzed  but  not  dead,  as  food  to  their  own  young.  But 
this  great  skill  with  a  narrow  specialization  is  achieved  at 
the  loss  of  the  power  of  adaptability  to  changing  circum¬ 
stances.  What  is  needed,  in  order  that  the  vital  impetus 
may  go  forward  in  the  complementary  directions  of  increas¬ 
ing  individuation  and  association,  is  that  the  capacity  should 
he  developed  to  fashion  tools  to  meet  changing  conditions. 
This  capacity  is  intelligence  or  intellect,  which  reaches  its 
highest  power  in  man,  who  is  preeminently  the  toolmaker. 
Whereas  an  insect  is  a  very  limited  set  of  fine  tools,  man, 
with  the  unspecialized  capacity  of  intellect,  becomes  the 


2  Creative  Evolution,  p.  265. 

3  Ibid.,  p.  248. 


TEMPORALISM 


321 


maker  of  tools,  of  material  tools  and  mental  and  social 
tools  (language,  social  order,  custom,  law,  morals,  science). 
Thus  man  is  capable  of  indefinite  progress  by  virtue  of  his 
adaptability  and  inventiveness. 

But  this  triumph  of  the  intellect,  as  the  power  of  in¬ 
definite  adaptability  to  the  material  conditions  of  living,  is 
achieved  at  a  loss.  The  intellect  is  at  home  only  in  me¬ 
chanical  affairs. 

Bergson  conceives  of  the  power  of  intelligence  as  rigidly 
limited  to  dealing  with  inorganic  solids,  with  mere  matter. 
Intelligence  is  able  only  to  comprehend  and  formulate  ab¬ 
stract  geometrized  equations  of  identity.  It  turns  the 
mobility,  warmth,  manifold  heterogeneity,  individuality, 
creativity,  and  freedom  of  the  life  force  into  frozen  con¬ 
cepts,  into  inert,  motionless,  and  skeletal  travesties  of  the 
rich  and  ever  moving  reality.  Life  is  ever  active  and  crea¬ 
tive,  reason  is  static  and  uncreative.  Thus  life,  which  is 
reality,  transcends  thought.  The  vital  impetus ,  creative, 
mysterious,  unpredictable,  and  uncontrollable,  is  the  power 
which  moves  the  world.  Reality,  as  life,  is  not  only  incal¬ 
culable  and  inconceivable  in  its  secret  tendencies,  move¬ 
ments,  and  results,  its  secret  essence  can  not  be  communi¬ 
cated,  for  language,  an  instrument  of  intelligence  fashioned 
to  meet  the  exigencies  of  social  intercourse,  is  utterly 
powerless  to  express  the  multitudinous  variety  and  novelty 
of  life’s  manifestations.  Words  are  pale  and  colorless  ab¬ 
stractions,  little  more  than  geometrical  marionettes.  Thus 
intelligence  trails  along  helplessly  in  the  wake  of  life, 
picking  up  superficial  uniformities  and  overlooking  the 
spontaneous  diversities  and  novelties  with  which  life  teems. 

But  Bergson  holds  that  man’s  metaphysical  thirst  for 
reality  must  be  slaked.  In  order  to  apprehend  reality  as  it 
really  is,  man  needs  to  develop  another  power — one  akin 
to  instinct  in  its  immediacy  and  sureness  of  grasp,  but 


322 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


vastly  wider  in  range.  This  power  is  intuition.  In  order 
to  know  life  and  spirit  we  must  divest  ourselves  of  the 
prejudices  engendered  by  perception  and  action.  “To 
touch  the  reality  of  spirit  we  must  place  ourselves  at  the 
point  where  an  individual  consciousness,  continuing  and 
retaining  the  past  in  a  present  enriched  by  it,  escapes  the 
law  of  necessity,  the  law  which  says  that  the  present  shall 
simply  repeat  the  past.”  “The  point  where  we  feel  our¬ 
selves  most  intimately  within  our  own  life  is  a  duration — in 
which  the  past,  always  moving  on,  is  swelling  unceasingly 
with  a  present  that  is  absolutely  new.  ”  4  “  The  more  we 
succeed  in  making  ourselves  conscious  of  our  progress  in 
pure  duration,  the  more  we  feel  the  different  parts  of  our 
being  enter  into  each  other,  and  our  whole  personality  con¬ 
centrate  itself  into  a  point,  or  rather  a  sharp  edge,  pressed 
against  the  future  and  cutting  into  it  unceasingly.”  5  This 
feeling  is  intuition.  “By  intuition  is  meant  the  kind  of 
intellectual  sympathy  by  which  one  places  one’s  self  within 
an  object  in  order  to  coincide  with  what  is  unique  in  it  and 
consequently  inexpressible.”  (Bergson,  An  Introduction 
to  Metaphysics ,  p.  15,  Hulme’s  translation.)  Analysis  ex¬ 
presses  a  thing  as  a  function  of  something  other  than  itself. 
It  translates  the  actual  thing  into  symbols.  Analysis  is  a 
representation  of  a  thing  from  successive  points  of  view, 
and  thus  goes  on  to  infinity.  But  intuition  is  a  simple  act 
of  direct,  intellectual  sympathy.  We  can  certainly  sympa¬ 
thize  with  our  own  selves.  By  dilating  this  self -intuition 
we  can  grasp  reality  outside  ourselves ;  since  all  reality  is 
action,  movement,  becoming.  God,  says  Bergson,  is  unceas¬ 
ing  life,  action,  freedom.  Creation  is  free  activity. 

Intuition  or  the  immediate  feeling  of,  the  direct  listen¬ 
ing  to,  the  face-to-face  vision  of,  our  inner  selfhood  is  the 
key  to  reality.  In  the  supreme  moments  of  life,  in  great 


4  Creative  Evolution ,  p.  200. 

s  Ibid.,  p.  201. 


TEMPORALISM 


323 


passional  and  volitional  crises,  when  man  feels  his  whole 
personality  surging  up  from  the  deeps  or  feels  that  he  is 
putting  his  whole  self  into  an  act :  ‘  ‘  Intuition  is  there, 
however  vague  and  above  all  discontinuous.  It  is  a  lamp 
almost  extinguished,  which  only  glimmers  now  and  then,  for 
a  few  moments  at  most.  But  it  glimmers  whenever  a  vital 
interest  is  at  stake.  On  our  personality,  on  our  liberty,  on 
the  place  we  occupy  in  the  whole  of  nature,  on  our  origin 
and  perhaps  on  our  destiny,  it  throws  a  light  feeble  and 
vacillating,  but  which  none  the  less  pierces  the  darkness 
of  the  night  in  which  the  intellect  leaves  us.  ’  ’ 6  The 
function  of  Philosophy  is  to  unite,  to  deepen,  and  dilate 
these  evanescent  intuitions  and  thus  to  enable  man  to  con¬ 
tinue  consciously  the  work  of  self -creation.  Intuition  has 
lagged  behind  intelligence  because  of  the  insistent  pressure 
of  practical  needs.  The  more  philosophy  advances  the 
more  it  will  perceive  that  intuition  is  mind  itself,  is  life 
itself.  A  complete  and  perfect  humanity  would  be  one  in 
which  both  intelligence  and  intuition  should  attain  their  full 
development.7  “Thus  to  the  eyes  of  a  philosophy  that  at¬ 
tempts  to  reabsorb  intellect  in  intuition,  many  difficulties 
vanish  or  become  light.  But  such  a  doctrine  does  not  only 
facilitate  speculation  ;  it  also  gives  us  more  power  to  act  and 
live.  For  with  it  we  feel  ourselves  no  longer  isolated  in 
humanity,  humanity  no  longer  seems  isolated  in  the  nature 
that  it  dominates.  As  the  smallest  grain  of  sand  is  bound 
up  with  our  entire  solar  system,  drawn  along  with  it  in 
that  undivided  movement  of  descent  which  is  materiality 
itself,  so  all  organized  beings,  from  the  humblest  to  the 
highest,  from  the  first  origins  of  life  to  the  time  in  which  we 
are,  and  in  all  places  as  in  all  times,  do  but  evidence  a 
single  impulsion,  the  inverse  of  the  movement  of  matter, 
and  in  itself  indivisible.  All  the  living  hold  together,  and 

6  C.  E.  (Creative  Evolution) ,  pp.  267,  268. 

7  Ibid.,  p.  267. 


324 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


all  yield  to  the  same  tremendous  push.  The  animal  takes 
its  stand  on  the  plant,  man  bestrides  animality,  and  the 
whole  of  humanity,  in  space  and  time,  is  one  immense  army 
galloping  beside  and  before  and  behind  each  of  us  in  an 
overwhelming  charge,  able  to  beat  down  every  resistance 
and  to  clear  the  most  formidable  obstacles,  perhaps  even 
death." 8 

This  new  irrationalism  announces  the  failure  of  thought 
or  intelligence  to  understand  life  and  reality,  and  its  sub¬ 
serviency  to  the  native  impulses  and  emotions.  Intelligence 
trades  in  abstractions,  we  are  told;  reality  is  concrete. 
Intelligence  is  static.  Life  is  dynamic.  Intelligence  is 
passive  and  receptive.  Life  is  active  and  creative.  In  all 
its  operations  thought  is  tied  up  to  space  forms  and  space 
metaphors.  Its  greatest  achievement  is  geometry.  Life, 
on  the  other  hand,  is  a  flowing  process  in  time.  Thought 
always  attempts  to  reduce  the  new  to  the  old,  differences  to 
sameness,  the  individual  to  the  universal.  Hence,  thought's 
attempted  transcripts  of  life  are  petrifactions.  It  endeavors 
to  transmute  into  frozen  conceptual  forms  the  warmth  and 
“go”  of  life.  It  gives  us  in  its  concepts  only  inert,  motion¬ 
less  skeletons  of  the  living  reality.  ‘  ‘  Gray,  dear  friend,  are 
all  thy  theories;  and  green  the  golden  tree  of  life."  Life 
and  reality  transcend  thought.  They  move  forward  with 
ever  increasing  acceleration  and  in  imprevisible  directions. 
The  vital  impetus,  creative,  mysterious,  unpredictable,  and 
uncontrollable,  is  the  power  which  moves  the  world.  Intelli¬ 
gence  trails  along  in  its  wake,  picking  up  superficial  unifor¬ 
mities  in  experience  and  overlooking  the  teeming  diversities 
and  novelties  of  life.  The  reason  is  utterly  inadequate  to 
understand  or  depict  the  nature  and  directions  of  the  vital 
impetus. 

In  order  to  live  truly  and  be  in  touch  with  reality  we 


8  Creative  Evolution,  pp.  270,  271. 


TEMPORALISM 


325 


must  leave  reason  or  intelligence  behind.  We  must  take 
to  feeling,  impulse,  and  a  mysterious  intuition.  We  must 
put  our  psychical  ears  to  the  ground  and  listen  to  the 
current  of  instinctive  life,  as  it  sweeps  through  us  and  by 
us,  although  we  can  neither  understand  it  nor  communicate 
rationally  what  we  hear.  We  shall  hear  unutterable  things, 
but  what  we  hear  will  be  the  mysterious  ebb  and  flow  of 
life’s  secret  forces.  Let  us  divest  ourselves  of  all  our  ordi¬ 
nary  intellectual  habiliments  and  plunge  naked  into  the 
living  turbid  waters  of  reality.  Only  thus  shall  we  gen¬ 
uinely  live.  Only  thus  do  we  escape  from  the  ghostland 
of  thought  into  the  warm  flesh  and  blood  of  real  change 
and  life.  Thus  speak  our  most  philosophical  irrationalists, 
of  which  Bergson  is  the  chief.  What  is  the  nature  of  this 
intuition  or  feeling  of  life,  this  ineffable  sense  of  rapport 
with  reality  ?  Foolish  question  !  It  is  incommunicable  and 
indescribable.  It  cannot  be  stated  in  terms  of  the  intelli¬ 
gence,  since  to  understand  is  to  immobilize  that  which  is 
essentially  mobility,  is  to  arrest  and  fixate  that  which  is 
essentially  process  and  change.  It  cannot  be  communicated, 
since  language  is  a  product  of  the  reason  which  only  skims 
over  the  surface  of  life  and  can  never  represent  its  depths. 

II.  A  Critique  of  Bergson’s  Doctrine  of  Intuition 

Reality  must  be  directly  perceived  or  felt,  by  an  imme¬ 
diate  contact  or  union  of  the  contemplating  soul  with  the 
reality  contemplated.  If  Bergson  means  that  there  must  be 
immediate  data  of  experience  at  the  basis  of  all  genuine 
knowledge,  thus  far  he  is  right.  He  is  right,  too,  in  holding 
that  the  data  for  the  understanding  of  the  nature  of  the 
self  and  of  all  psychical  and  spiritual  life  must  be  found  in 
the  living  contemplation  of  the  Ego’s  own  life.  I  can  only 
understand  and  appreciate  another  Ego  by  recreating  his 
experiences  and  attitudes  within  myself.  The  key  to  the 


326 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


meaning  of  life  is  to  be  found  in  the  experience  of  living. 

Bergson  holds  that  there  need  be  no  conflict  between 
science  and  intuition.  We  must  use  the  resources  of  intel¬ 
lect  to  enrich  our  intuitions.  Intuition  is  a  sort  of  instinct, 
rendered  more  comprehensive,  penetrating  and  elastic.  It 
is  an  intellectual  sympathy  with  the  most  intimate  part  of 
reality  (C.  E.,  pp.  89-91)  ...  by  intuition  I  mean  instinct 
that  has  become  disinterested,  self-conscious,  capable  of 
reflecting  upon  its  object  and  of  enlarging  it  indefinitely  ’  * 
(Ibid.,  p.  176).  There  is  no  way  of  passing  from  intelli¬ 
gence  to  intuition ;  we  cannot  win  to  knowledge  of  the 
reality  of  life  by  the  highest  exercise  of  intelligence.  But 
there  is  a  way  of  passing  from  intuition  to  intelligence. 
Hence,  if  we  begin  wfith  intuition  we  may  enrich  it  from 
the  work  of  intellect.  Bergson  tells  us  that  intelligence 
and  instinct  differ  in  kind,  not  in  degree,  although  they 
never  occur  entirely  separate  (Ibid.,  pp.  135,  136,  142). 
Intelligence  knows  only  the  immobile  forms  and  relations 
of  things.  It  cannot  comprehend  life  (Ibid.,  pp.  145-155). 
Instinct  knows  things  in  their  immediate  characters.  It 
would  seem  to  follow  that  the  knowledge  won  through 
intuition,  a  dilated  form  of  instinct,  must  differ  entirely 
from  it  in  kind.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  Bergson  contrasts 
them  in  the  sharpest  manner  again  and  again.  But,  when 
he  wishes  to  save  a  place  for  the  results  of  the  intellect’s 
work,  that  intuition  may  utilize  these,  he  hedges.  Thus  he 
tells  us  that  the  knowledge  yielded,  respectively,  by  instinct 
and  intelligence  differ  in  degree  not  in  kind  (Ibid.,  p.  145). 
How  can  two  cognitive  powers,  differing  in  kind,  produce 
knowledge  differing  only  in  degree?  But  Bergson’s  con¬ 
ception  of  intelligence  is  altogether  too  narrow.  Intelli¬ 
gence  is  not  tied  up  to  abstract  spatial  forms.  It  does 
not  traffic  alone  in  barren  identities,  static  formulas,  and 
concepts.  It  has  other  modes  of  operation  than  geometry. 
The  business  of  intellect  is  to  interpret  and  organize 


TEMPORALISM 


327 


the  data  of  experience.  These  data  have  connections, 
relations,  meanings,  and,  thus,  are  intelligible.  If  diversity, 
novelty,  dynamic  change,  increasing  individuality  and  free¬ 
dom  are  facts,  the  intellect  does  not  commit  suicide  in 
recognizing  them  nor  does  it  try  to  reduce  them  to  a  dead 
monotony  and  colorless  sameness.  The  intellect  operates 
in  this  variegated  moving  world.  Science  is  organized 
common  sense  and  philosophy  is  common  sense  organized 
and  interpreted  as  completely  as  possible.  The  intelligence 
is  the  power  of  reflectively  organizing  the  perceptions,  the 
impulsions,  the  deeds,  the  feelings,  the  valuations  of  the 
self,  and  so  interpreting  and  interrelating  the  whole  life  of 
the  self  in  its  organic  interplay  with  nature  and  humanity ; 
so  that  thereby  our  impulses  become  dynamic  elements  in  a 
harmonious  personality,  so  that  thereby  our  deeds  take  on  a 
social  and  universal  significance,  so  that  thereby  our  dumb 
and  blind  feelings  learn  to  speak  the  language  of  reason 
and  become  refined  and  transformed  into  the  higher  senti¬ 
ments  of  a  well  articulated  personality  ;  and  so  that  thereby, 
too,  our  valuations  as  the  guides  to  our  deeds  and  the  finest 
fruits  of  our  experiences  become  the  universalized  and 
harmonious  instruments  by  which  the  individual  self  at 
once  comes  into  fuller  self-possession  as  a  richer  and  more 
significant  personal  unity  and  comes  into  fuller  union  with 
man,  with  nature,  and  with  the  universal  order.  Perhaps 
this  is  what  Bergson  means ;  but  it  is  unfortunate  that  he 
plays  into  the  hands  of  irresponsible  irrationalism  and 
emotionalistic  mysticism  by  offering  us,  as  a  foundation 
for  his  metaphysics,  such  an  erroneous,  ridiculous,  wooden 
image  travesty  of  intelligence  or  reason.  By  all  means  we 
must  seek  reality  first-hand  in  living,  in  acting,  in  feeling. 
But  by  all  means,  if  the  universe  be  not  a  crazy  patchwork, 
or  a  madhouse,  we  shall  find  our  true  selves,  we  shall  under¬ 
stand  and  control  nature  and  we  shall  organize  our  lives 
into  richer  and  more  meaningful  internal  and  social  har- 


328 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


mony  and  attain  union  with  the  universal  meaning  of 
things,  only  by  the  unremitting  exercise  of  the  analytic- 
synthetic,  organizing,  and  interpreting  activity  of  intel¬ 
ligence. 

III.  Summary  of  Bergson’s  Temporalism 

Bergson  has  shown  very  skilfully  the  defects  in  the 
mechanistic  interpretation  of  organic  evolution,  and  in  the 
older  form  of  absolutistic  teleology  which  regarded  the 
origin,  growth,  and  functioning  of  living  organisms  as 
simply  the  unfolding  of  a  predetermined  plan.  Mechanism 
assumes  that  there  is  nothing  in  evolution  but  the  blind 
shifting  of  material  particles  in  space.  The  origin  and 
infinite  diversification  of  living  organisms  is  a  purely  acci¬ 
dental  consequence  of  the  permutations  and  combination  of 
an  infinite  multitude  of  mass  particles  tumbling  about  in 
infinite  space  through  endless  time.  The  mechanistic  view 
assumes  that  the  whole  is  given  all  at  once,  and  that  nothing 
really  new  can  ever  be  achieved.  All  changes  and  novelties 
are  simply  blind  readjustments  in  the  parts.  The  older 
teleology  assumed  that  everything  which  takes  place  is  the 
necessary  consequence  of  a  predetermined  plan.  All  that 
takes  place  in  the  process  of  evolution  has  been  foreseen  and 
timed  to  occur  just  when  it  does  occur  in  fact.  Thus  the 
older  teleology  has  no  explanation  for  failures  and  wastes, 
for  the  blind  alleys,  for  the  strange  and  bewildering  diver¬ 
sities  of  nature’s  life.  Like  the  mechanistic  theory,  it 
assumes  that  the  whole  is  given  all  at  once.  In  the  one  case 
this  whole  is  the  mechanical  predetermination  of  mass 
particles  in  space,  in  the  other  case  it  is  the  equally  neces¬ 
sary  predetermination  of  an  absolute  design  unerringly 
carried  out.  Both  views  deny  the  real  significance  of 
novelty,  growth,  variation,  and  individuality.  Both  are 
alike  incompatible  with  the  belief  in  the  freedom  of  the 


TEMPORALISM 


329 


personality  of  man.  For  both  the  course  of  evolution  is 
like  the  rattling  off  of  the  links  of  endless  chains  forged 
from  all  eternity. 

Against  both  views  Bergson  sets  his  own  view  that  the 
evolution  of  life  is  a  progress,  resulting  from  the  struggle 
of  the  creative  activity  of  the  vital  impetus  or  life  force, 
which  is  the  source  of  individuality,  of  all  variation,  growth, 
and  novelty,  against  the  obstructive  tendency  of  inert 
matter.  Pure  matter,  if  there  were  such  a  thing,  would  be 
the  wholly  static  arrangement  of  things  in  space.  A.  world 
of  pure  matter  would  be  dead  and  motionless.  Juxtaposi¬ 
tion  of  parts  in  space  is  the  essence  of  materiality.  By 
contrast  the  essence  of  life  and  mind  is  development  or 
movement  in  time.  Life,  soul,  and  time  or  duration — these 
are  identical.  No  two  instants  of  time  are  absolutely  the 
same ;  no  two  moments  of  life  are  completely  identical ;  no 
two  successive  phases  of  the  soul  are  entirely  the  same. 
Ceaseless  activity,  constant  mobility  and  creativity,  a  living 
and  evergrowing  present  in  which  the  past  is  conserved  in 
so  far  as  it  aids  in  the  production  of  the  future — such  is 
the  nature  of  the  life  force ,  the  creative  soul  of  things,  the 
essence  of  time  and  duration.  Life  and  soul  are  the  invisible 
progress  of  the  present  and  past  growing  into  the  future. 

Evolution  is  a  creative  psychical  process,  a  ceaseless  effort 
towards  novelty,  individuality,  and  freedom,  carried  out  in 
the  face  of  the  obstructive  counter  current  of  materiality, 
against  the  downward  tendency  which  is  making  for  the 
absolute  equilibrium  of  death.  The  world  is  neither  wholly 
dynamic  nor  wholly  static.  It  is  the  theater  of  the  cosmical 
struggle  of  the  dynamic  and  the  static.  The  life  force  is 
mind.  For  the  vital  impetus,  the  moving  spring  of  all 
evolution,  is  immaterial.  Nay,  it  is  the  very  essence  of 
immateriality.  All  finite  forms  of  individuality  are  the 
resultants  of  the  unceasing  endeavor  of  the  vital  impetus 
to  insert  itself  in  and  to  master  matter,  to  subdue  matter 


330 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


to  its  ends.  The  varieties  of  living  forms,  with  all  their 
complexities  and  imperfections,  are  the  unforeseen  but 
useful  results  of  the  struggle  of  the  life  force  with  the 
counter  tendency  to  inertia,  equilibrium,  and  sameness  which 
is  matter.  Thus  there  is  novelty,  contingency,  imprevisi- 
bility  in  the  temporal  process  of  evolution.  This  process  is 
the  very  secret  essence  and  substance  of  reality.  Man,  its 
highest  product,  is  the  fullest,  the  most  successful,  accom¬ 
plishment  of  the  vital  impetus.  He  has  most  individuality, 
freedom,  or  creativity,  power  of  adaption  to  and  modifica¬ 
tion  of  the  environment,  the  greatest  range  of  action, 
because  of  the  superior  plasticity  of  his  intelligence,  the 
greatest  capacity  to  conserve  the  results  of  the  past  in  the 
present  and  to  bring  them  to  bear  in  giving  birth  to  a 
richer  future.  He  can  grow  without  ceasing,  because  of 
the  rich  endowment  of  his  soul  life.  His  life  comes  down, 
nay  is  a  very  part  of,  the  stream  of  time,  freighted  with  the 
past  which  interpenetrates  with  his  present.  His  vivid 
consciousness  and  intelligence  illumines,  from  the  immediate 
and  remoter  past,  that  zone  of  the  environment  on  which 
successful  action  depends.  Thus  conscious  intelligence, 
while  but  a  small  part  of  the  soul’s  life,  fulfills  the  impor¬ 
tant  function  of  enabling  a  man  to  act  with  prevision,  and 
thus  to  liberate  himself  from  the  fetters  of  the  past  as  fait 
accompli  and  from  the  dangers  of  the  present.  Conscious¬ 
ness  lightens  his  pathway  through  time  and  his  labors  in 
time  and  thus  gives  to  the  vital  impetus  a  higher  potency 
in  man  than  in  any  other  organism.  Thus  the  true  reality 
for  Bergson  is  dynamic,  creative,  psychical. 

Bergson  has  not  yet  published  anything  on  the  philosophy 
of  religion.  According  to  his  expressions  to  correspondents, 
for  him  the  life  force  is  the  creation  of  God.  At  any  rate  it 
is  of  the  very  substance  and  soul  of  reality ;  it  is  essentially 
mobile,  dynamic,  and  creative.  The  general  effect  of  Berg- 


TEMPORALISM 


331 


son’s  philosophy  has  been  to  strengthen  the  conviction  of 
the  positive  reality  and  value  of  growth  and  evolution  and 
to  find  the  key  to  the  meaning  of  evolution  in  the  creative 
activity  of  mind.9 

IV.  The  Temporalism  of  William  James 

James’  conception  of  reality  has  much  in  common  with 
Bergson’s.  James  protested  against  the  idea  of  a  “ block 
universe”  or  eternally  complete  and  timeless  world.  He 
argued  repeatedly  and  powerfully  for  the  evolutionary 
and  dramatic  or  historical  conception  of  reality  as  a  grow¬ 
ing  universe,  a  world  whose  future  never  could  be  wholly 
foreseen  by  even  an  infinite  mind,  since  it  consists  of  a 
plurality  of  individual  centers  of  will  who  have  the  power 
of  self-determining  or  free  activity.  James’  picture  of  the 
universe  is  one  in  which  men  are  real  agents,  not  puppets 
either  of  a  blind  aggregate  of  mass  particles  or  of  a  Divine, 
despotic  Absolute.  The  world  is  a  vast  assemblage  of  finite 
agents,  whose  fates  are  in  some  degree  in  their  own  hands.10 
Each  member  of  the  world  has  his  own  part  to  play  in  the 
making  of  the  world ’s  future.  God  is  the  great  companion 
or  other  self,  a  superhuman  but  finite,  conscious  will  with 
which  our  human  lives  are  probably  continuous.  In  our 
religious  and  moral  experiences  we  probably  are  in  touch 
with  the  supreme  other  self.  But  God  is  not  all-embracing ; 
he  is  finite  either  in  power  or  knowledge,  or  in  both  at 
once.11  God  “is  himself  a  part  (of  the  universe)  when  the 
system  is  conceived  pluralistically,  ”  as  J ames  conceived  it. 
“Having  an  environment,  being  in  time,  and  working  out 
a  history  just  like  ourselves,  he  escapes  from  the  foreignness 
from  all  that  is  human,  of  the  static,  timeless,  perfect  abso- 


9  See  William  James,  A  Pluralistic  Universe,  pp.  262,  263  ff. 

10  IHd.,  p.  317. 

n  Ibid.,  p.  318. 


332 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


lute.”  12  James,  in  the  interests  of  fidelity  to  actual  human 
experience,  and  especially  to  the  moral  and  dramatic  signifi¬ 
cance  of  the  common  human  lot,  embraces  the  pluralistic 
alternative.  His  reaction  to  the  tangled  facts  of  human  life, 
its  struggle,  pathos,  and  mystery,  led  him  to  elect  a  spiritual 
creed,  a  world-view,  in  which  there  is  room  for  possible 
free  self-determination  by  the  individual  soul;  wide  possi¬ 
bilities  of  good  and  evil  in  a  universe  which  evolves  by  the 
synergistic  and  antagonistic  efforts  of  God  and  men ;  and, 
with  reference  to  the  ultimate  outcome,  a  melioristic  outlook, 
a  gospel  of  hope,  by  contrast  with  pessimism ,  the  gospel  of 
despair,  and  optimism ,  the  gospel  of  quietism  or  nonoth- 
ingism. 

In  short,  choose  the  temporalistic  universe  and  life  and 
history  become  freighted  for  you  with  infinite  zest  and 
meaning ;  the  world  becomes  the  field  for  the  fashioning 
of  souls  and  of  civilizations.  It  becomes  a  place  of  high 
adventure,  a  romantic  universe.  But  it  becomes  a  risky 
place,  no  finished  perfection  anywhere,  no  absolute  retreat 
from  the  fretful  stir  unprofitable  and  the  fever  of  this 
world.  Always  the  supreme  command  is 

Speed  on,  Fight  on,  Fare  ever, 

There  as  here. 

Y.  The  Temporal  and  the  Eternal 

In  the  light  of  the  last  two  chapters,  we  cannot  accept 
any  theory  of  reality  which  denies  or  even  minimizes  the 
reality  and  significance  of  time,  duration,  or  change. 

On  the  other  hand,  temporalism,  raises  a  very  serious 

12  James,  A  Pluralistic  Universe,  p.  318,  “The  only  way  of  es¬ 
cape,”  etc.,  pp.  310,  311,  “Monism,  etc.,”  pp.  322-328.  See  also  his 
Some  Problems  of  Philosophy,  especially  Chapters  VII  to  XIII. 
This  work,  left  unfinished  at  his  death,  expresses  James’  maturest 
treatment  of  the  problem. 


TEMPORALISM 


333 


theological  and  metaphysical  problem.  If  God  actively 
participates  in  history,  if  he  lives  and  energizes  in  time, 
does  he  not  grow  ?  And  if  he  grows,  is  he  not  always  imper¬ 
fect,  suffering  from  the  lack  of  completeness  ?  If  the  history 
of  the  world  is  the  working  out  of  the  drama  of  the  divine 
purpose  by  the  synergistic  deeds  of  God  and  finite  wills, 
then,  until  this  purpose  be  fully  achieved,  there  is  want  or 
deficiency  in  God  as  well  as  in  man,  although,  of  course,  in 
very  different  degree.  And  one  who  replies  that  the  divine 
purpose  is  eternally  or  timelessly  realized  is  surely  talking 
nonsense.  A  purpose  timelessly  fulfilled  is  no  purpose. 

On  the  other  hand,  if  the  whole  sum  of  perfection  is  now 
and  always  timelessly  present  or  real,  then  all  the  growth 
and  struggle  of  time,  the  whole  course  of  natural  and 
historical  evolution,  and  all  the  innumerable  histories  of 
finite  personalities,  constitute  a  tale  devoid  of  meaning. 
The  whole  time  process  with  all  its  burdens  and  its  bur- 
geonings  becomes  an  inexplicable  illusion.  Such  is  the 
dilemma  of  metaphysics  and  theology  before  the  problem 
of  time  and  evolution. 

Choose  the  static  timeless  perfection  of  the  Absolute  One 
and  you  gain  perfection  or  completeness  at  the  cost  of 
making  time,  evolution,  all  the  innumerable  histories  of 
worlds  and  living  beings,  all  the  tragic  dramas  of  nations 
and  of  individuals,  dissolve  into  phantoms  of  the  morning 
mists. 


The  cloud-capped  towers,  the  gorgeous  palaces, 

The  solemn  temples,  the  great  globe  itself, 

Yea,  all  which  it  inherit,  shall  dissolve, 

And,  like  this  insubstantial  pageant  faded, 

Leave  not  a  rack  behind.  We  are  such  stuff 
As  dreams  are  made  on;  and  our  little  life 
Is  rounded  with  a  sleep. 

Is  there  any  way  of  escape  from  between  the  horns  of  this 


334 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


dilemma  ?  The  problem  of  reconciling  the  belief  in  a  per¬ 
fect  reality  with  the  acceptance  of  the  reality  and  meaning 
of  the  temporal  order  is  the  knottiest  of  all  the  knotty 
problems  of  metaphysics  and  theology.  James  showed  a 
keen  scent  for  the  vital  issues  when  he  laid  such  stress  on 
this  issue.13  There  can  be  no  question  that,  in  contrast  with 
speculative  Hindu  mysticism  and  pantheism,  temporalism 
is  in  affinity  with  the  ethical  and  religious  consciousness  of 
Hebraism  and  Christianity,  except  where  the  latter  has 
been  deeply  infected  with  neoplatonic  mysticism.  The 
average  Christian  religionist  believes  in  the  serious  and 
dramatic  quality  of  the  volitional  life.  He  believes  that  the 
things  that  men  feel  and  think  and  do,  as  individuals,  count 
for  something  in  the  world  and  have  some  significance  in 
the  eyes  of  God.  He  does  not  think  of  God  as  the  absolute 
motionless  unity,  in  which  all  human  feelings  and  deeds 
are  literally  parts  or  elements,  and  in  which  their  dynamic 
and  poignant  diversity  is  mysteriously  transmuted  beyond 
all  recognition  into  a  timeless  and  static  harmony. 

The  whole  philosophical  background  of  the  Hebrew 
prophetic  and  the  Christian  world  view  is  the  conception  of 
a  governing  spiritual  will,  a  dynamic  ethical  intelligence 
which  ceaselessly  functions  in  time ;  a  Being  distinct  from 
and  related  to  other  beings ;  an  overruling  providence  who 
continually  energizes  in  the  natural  world,  but  more  fully 
and  significantly  in  the  human  historical  and  social  world. 
The  world  view  of  Christianity  implies  that  serious  and 
vital  issues,  issues  fraught  with  high  import  from  God’s 
standpoint  as  well  as  from  man ’s,  are  at  stake  in  individual 
lives,  in  the  social  order,  and  in  the  ongoing  history  of 
humanity.  Thus,  temporalistic  pluralism  is  very  close  to 
the  heart  of  the  common  Christian  heritage.  Temporalism 
is  a  doctrine  which  summons  to  choice,  to  action,  to  hope. 

is  Especially  in  A  Pluralistic  Universe  and  his  unfinished  Some 
Problems  of  Philosophy. 


TEMPORALISM 


335 


It  is  a  philosophy  that  makes  room  for  freedom,  individ¬ 
uality,  and  progress.  It  does  not  distort  beyond  recognition 
the  face  of  our  common  humanity  or  derealize  our  most 
strenuous  moments.  It  has  its  roots  in  the  facts  of  human 
volitional  experience.  It  does  not  cause  all  the  variety  and 
complexity,  all  the  tang  and  color,  in  human  individuality 
to  disappear  in  the  lion ’s  den  of  the  Absolute.  It  is  disposed 
to  estimate  human  deeds  and  experiences  at  something  near 
their  face  values,  whereas  from  the  standpoint  of  eternal- 
istic  monism  it  is  impossible  to  tell  what  value,  if  any,  this 
mixed,  confused,  and  mutable  realm  of  human  life  can  have. 
For  no  one,  not  even  the  philosopher  of  the  Absolute,  can 
raise  himself  to  the  point  of  vantage  of  the  Absolute ;  and, 
if  he  could,  he  would  have  undergone  such  a  metamorphosis 
that  he  could  no  longer  hold  converse  with  the  denizens  of 
time. 

I  offer  the  following  suggestions  as  to  how  the  reality  of 
a  perfect  being  might  be  reconciled  with  the  imperfections 
of  the  temporal  order : 

1.  The  ideal  of  perfection  as  consisting  in  a  timelessly 
complete  and  changeless  reality  is  a  false  ideal.  If  reality 
were  a  static  eternally  complete  Unity  the  universe  would 
be  a  dead  and  lifeless  one.  The  best  type  of  perfection  is 
the  ceaseless  and  tireless  energizing  of  an  intelligent  will. 
Self -activity  is  the  authentic  sign  of  perfection. 

2.  Eternalistic  monism  can  give  no  intelligible  account 
of  the  existence  of  the  temporal  world  of  selves,  with  their 
growth  through  self-activity  and  purposive  striving.  If 
one  start  with  the  timeless  Absolute  there  is  no  way  down 
to  the  temporal  plurality  of  finite  and  growing  souls.  The 
existence  and  the  striving  and  suffering  of  a  multitude  of 
individuals  becomes  an  impenetrable  enigma.  It  becomes 
an  unaccountable  fall.  Therefore,  in  order  to  understand 
the  actual  world,  we  must  start  from  the  standpoint  of 
temporalism,  from  a  recognition  of  the  significant  reality 


336 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


of  dynamic  centers,  of  living  organisms  and  souls.  On  the 
other  hand,  temporalism  can  find  an  adequate  substitute 
for  the  timeless  absolute  unity,  one  that  meets  better  the 
ethical  and  religious  needs.  From  the  standpoint  of  static 
eternalism,  all  growth,  evolution,  history,  and  purposiveness 
are  illusory.  We  must  hold  to  their  reality  and  therefore 
we  reject  eternalism. 

3.  There  must  be  change  and  growth  in  God’s  experi¬ 
ence  or  intuitive  consciousness  of  his  world,  if  life  and  his¬ 
tory  have  any  positive  meaning.  He  must  feel  the  losses 
and  the  gains,  the  failures  and  achievements,  of  finite 
souls.  He  must,  as  energizing  and  directing  and  guiding 
spirit,  bear  a  part  in  the  travails  and  the  sufferings,  the 
victories  and  the  joys  of  his  creatures.  He  must  share  in 
the  processes  of  temporal  growth.  He  must  soil  his  hands 
in  the  grime  of  this  muddy  universe.  A  world  which  is  the 
place  and  means  for  the  growth  of  individualities  and  for 
the  perfecting  of  personalities  must  be  an  evolutionary  or 
historical  world.  “My  father  worketh  hitherto  and  I  must 
work. ”  “I  have  yet  many  things  to  say  unto  you. ”  “ First 
the  grain  of  seed,  then  the  corn  in  the  ear.”  The  Chris¬ 
tian  doctrine  of  the  sympathy  and  suffering  of  God  implies 
the  continuous  presence  and  activity  of  God  in  the  world 
of  time  and  history. 

4.  Change  and  growth  in  God’s  experience,  as  due  to 
the  historical  and  evolving  character  of  his  world,  does 
not  imply  that  his  character,  will,  or  intelligence,  undergo 
any  alteration.  If  the  evolution  of  matter,  of  suns  and 
star  systems,  of  living  organisms,  and  the  historical  devel¬ 
opment  of  souls  and  peoples,  be  self-expressions  of  his 
unvarying  will,  then  although  there  is  change  in  his  experi¬ 
ence,  his  nature  or  character,  that  is  his  will  and  purpose, 
may  remain  unchanged.  He  is,  as  Aristotle  said,  the  per¬ 
fect  energizer,  the  ceaselessly  actualizing  will  who  deter¬ 
mines  the  conditions,  directions,  and  goals  or  standards  of 


TEMPORALISM 


337 


natural  evolution,  and  human  growth.  If  the  realization, 
through  temporal  changes,  of  finite  individuality,  be  part 
of  the  central  and  enduring  purpose,  be  the  self -utterance 
of  the  creative  will,  certainly  the  progressive  fulfillment  of 
that  purpose  does  not  change  the  nature  of  that  will.  It 
only  enlarges  its  field  of  operation  and  increases  the  fruits 
of  its  operations.  Indeed,  an  enduring  purpose  or  intelli¬ 
gent  will  is  implied  in  the  fact  that  matter  has  determinate 
properties  that  make  possible  the  evolution  of  living  forms, 
that  these  living  beings  can  respond  in  specific  fashions  to 
relatively  fixed  environments,  that  life  has  certain  deter¬ 
minate  or  individual  capacities,  such  as  sensitivity,  repro¬ 
ductiveness,  mobility,  intelligence,  and  that  in  man  these 
capacities  enter  upon  new  levels  of  development,  resulting 
in  morals,  social  order,  science,  art,  and  culture  generally. 
Without  permanence  of  cosmical  conditions  for  evolution, 
and  definite  capacities  in  the  evolving  elements,  which  deter¬ 
mine  the  persistence  of  directions  and  goals  of  evolution, 
there  would  be  no  continuity  in  change,  and  hence  no  genu¬ 
ine  evolution.  For  blind  chaotic  discontinuous  change  is 
not  evolution.  Evolution  in  nature,  progress  in  history, 
development  in  the  individual — all  these  features  of  the 
temporal  world  involve  the  reality  of  an  enduring  intelli¬ 
gent  power,  purpose  or  will,  since  they  involve  specific 
directions  and  goals. 

There  is  much  loose  thinking  abroad  in  regard  to  God’s 
infinitude.  God  cannot  be  infinite  in  the  sense  that  he  can 
be  anything  that  we  can  think  of.  We  can  think  of  many 
possibilities  that  cannot  be  realities  in  his  nature,  since 
they  would  contradict  the  idea  of  a  perfect  being,  and 
would  even  be  incompatible  with  the  idea  of  a  normal 
human  being.  God  cannot  be  a  liar.  He  cannot  think 
things  that  are  incompatible  with  the  logical  principles  of 
correct  thinking.  He  cannot  will  things  that  contradict  his 
fundamental  purposes  and  aims.  He  cannot,  for  instance, 


338 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


will  that  a  world  of  selves  should  be  both  existent  and  non¬ 
existent.  He  cannot  will  that  what  for  him  is  the  supreme 
good  should  not  be  realized.  God  must  be  a  determinate 
being,  with  a  definite  character.  He  must  be  the  perfect 
individual  if  he  be  anything  meaningful.  But  these  are 
not  limitations  imposed  upon  him  from  without.  His  lim¬ 
itations  are  self-limitations  which  are  the  self-expressions 
of  his  individuality.  He  is  a  determinate  individual  but 
not  finite.  A  being  that  might  be  anything  imaginable,  a 
nest  of  contradictory  possibilities,  is  actually  nothing. 
God’s  purpose  towards  the  world  must  be  the  continuous 
actualization  of  his  character,  and,  if  this  be  unchanging, 
so  will  his  purpose  be.  If  he  be  the  creator  of  finite  selves, 
whom  he  endows  with  power  to  err,  to  struggle,  to  choose, 
and  thus  to  develop  into  fuller  selfhood,  and  if  he  be  the 
originator  and  sustainer  of  the  evolving  physical  and  vital 
world  in  which  these  finite  selves  are  generated  and  grow 
in  time,  then,  in  calling  into  being  and  sustaining  such  a 
world,  the  only  limitations  on  his  action  are  the  self¬ 
limitations  involved  in  his  own  creative  love  and  provi¬ 
dence. 

As  the  director  and  sustainer  of  the  whole  process  of 
temporal  succession,  and  the  source  of  the  standards  or  ends 
by  which  the  endless  succession  of  stages  in  evolution  and 
in  the  origin  and  development  of  individual  lives  are  con¬ 
nected  into  a  continuous  movement,  God  must  be  an  un¬ 
changing  being,  the  changeless  ground  of  the  coherent  and 
intelligible  order  of  change. 

5.  As  to  God’s  relation  to  time  and  all  that  takes  place 
in  time  I  would  say,  not  that  he  is  timeless,  but  that  he  is 
the  unitary  and  enduring  ground  of  continuity  and  order 
in  the  time-process.  Only  the  “now”  or  actual  present  is 
“really”  real.  The  past  has  now  the  amount  of  reality 
which  is  involved  in  the  conservation  and  activity  of  a  part 
of  that  past  in  the  present.  The  future  has  the  amount  of 


TEMPORALISM 


339 


reality  which  is  involved  in  the  dynamic  quality  of  the 
present,  by  virtue  of  which  there  will  issue  from  this 
present  further  presents  which  will  be  its  active  outgrowths. 
Such  is  the  time-order  for  every  finite  self — a  succession  of 
dynamic  “nows”  or  energizing  presents,  which  blossom 
into  one  another  and  of  which  pasts  and  futures  are  func¬ 
tions.  Each  self’s  own  present  sums  up  and  carries  for¬ 
ward  its  pasts  and  is  big  with  its  future.  The  self’s  life 
now  is  charged  with  its  vital  pasts  and  blossoms  into  its 
futures.  Both  the  tragedy  and  the  promise  of  our  pasts 
lie,  not  in  the  fact  that  they  are  irrevocably  gone,  but  in 
that  they  really  constitute  functional  activities  of  our 
presents. 

But  since  time,  evolution,  and  history  are  real,  there  must 
be,  underneath  all  finite  temporal  processes,  an  objective 
and  universal  time-order,  which  sustains,  includes,  and  uni¬ 
fies  the  infinite  multitude  of  finite  time-orders.  There  must 
be  a  universal  “Now”  or  Infinite  Present,  of  which  all  the 
variety  and  succession  of  finite  presents  are  but  broken 
lights.  God’s  life,  I  would  say,  is  that  Infinite  Present, 
that  universal  Now.  His  will  and  his  intuition  constitute 
the  continuous  dynamic  ground,  the  vital  functioning 
activity  or  will  which  conserves  the  past  of  the  universe 
and  guarantees  its  future.  There  can  be  no  actual  univer¬ 
sal  past  unless  there  be  a  universal  will  and  intuition  in 
which  all  finite  pasts  are  conserved.  God  is  now,  as  always, 
that  Universal  Self.  There  can  be  no  real  futures,  unless 
there  be  a  continuously  enduring  and  unvarying  will, 
which,  in  the  orderly  succession  of  its  presents,  is  the  intel¬ 
ligent  ground  of  the  endless  succession  of  finite  presents. 
God’s  conserving  will  is  thus  the  enduring  ground  of  the 
future,  as  well  as  of  the  past  and  present. 

6.  Finally,  as  regards  the  question  of  the  predetermina¬ 
tion  of  the  future,  each  finite  self  has  given,  within  its  own 
nature  in  relation  to  its  specific  environment,  certain  defi- 


340 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


nite  and  limited  possibilities  of  future  choice  and  action. 
The  number  and  nature  of  these  possibilities  must  be  pre¬ 
determined,  since  they  are  determinate.  Thus  each  self’s 
will  is  limited  to  its  possible  choices.  Therefore  God,  as  the 
unifying  and  continuous  ground  of  all  possible  future 
events,  must  foreknow  all  that  is  possible  to  every  finite 
agent  in  every  situation  which  that  self  will  ever  face. 
Does  he  also  foreknow  what  the  actual  choice  of  every  self 
will  be  in  every  case?  This  is  the  ancient  problem  of 
determinism  and  indeterminism.  The  question  is  whether, 
invariably  and  throughout  all  time,  there  is  really  only  one 
course  of  action  open  to  every  individual  at  every  junc¬ 
ture  in  life.  Could  a  self  ever  have  done  otherwise,  than, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  it  did?  The  determinist  answers, 
No!  The  indeterminist  answers,  Yes,  sometimes! 

The  scientific  conception  of  the  world  makes  for  deter¬ 
minism,  since  if  determinism  is  never  wholly  true  to  the 
facts  thus  far  causal  explanation  has  reached  its  limit.  I 
may  point  out  that  causal  explanation  does  always  reach 

limits  in  science — the  limits  set  bv  the  ultimate  and  not 

* 

further  reducible  properties  of  space  and  time,  matter,  life 
and,  indeed,  by  the  ultimate  qualities  of  sensation  and  the 
laws  of  selective  thinking.  Why  not  then,  too,  by  the  ulti¬ 
mate  qualities  of  selfhood  or  personality?  There  are  irre¬ 
ducible  qualities  in  the  elemental  facts  of  experience.  For 
example  I  see  with  my  eyes  and  hear  with  my  ears.  No 
one  science  has  yet  explained  fully  these  elementary  facts. 

The  common  sense  belief  in  man ’s  power  to  choose 
between  alternatives,  the  belief  in  responsibility  and  guilt, 
the  common  idea  of  freedom,  is  that  sometimes  at  least  the 
issues  of  voluntary  choice  are  not  wholly  predetermined, 
and  that  the  power  of  spontaneous  choice  is  no  illusion, 
although  its  field  of  operation  may  be  limited.  The  com¬ 
mon  sense  belief  may  be  but  the  reflection  of  man’s  igno¬ 
rance  of  his  own  fatally  fixed  nature  and  of  his  environ- 


TEMPORALISM 


341 


mental  determinants  in  their  complex  interplay.  It  may 
be  that,  for  an  infinite  knower  and  will,  everything  in  the 
temporal  order  is  predetermined  down  to  the  last  iota  and 
that  all  our  apparently  free  choices  are  but  the  rattling  off 
of  the  successive  links  in  the  chains  of  our  fates,  predeter¬ 
mined  throughout  the  beginningless  pasts  and  the  endless 
futures.  But,  if  temporalism  be  true,  if  individuality  and 
history  be  more  than  mere  phantasmal  appearance,  if  all 
the  toilsome  and  devious  struggles  along  the  pathways  of 
evolution,  if  all  the  labors  and  the  sufferings,  all  the  trage¬ 
dies  and  failures,  all  the  joys  and  triumphs  of  human 
history,  all  the  zest  and  poignancy  of  individual  lives,  are 
really  worthful  and  significant  in  some  measure,  if  these 
multiform  and  tingling  facts  of  human  experience  are  not 
mere  hallucinations,  born  of  human  phantasy,  there  must 
be  in  human  nature  a  fragment  of  creative  will,  a  finite 
but  nevertheless  authentic  reproduction  in  time  of  the 
Infinite  and  Enduring  Will.  If  once  in  a  lifetime,  or  in  a 
whole  series  of  lifetimes,  man  can  perform  a  creative  deed 
that  springs  spontaneously  from  the  deeps  of  his  spiritual 
selfhood,  then  determinism  as  a  metaphysical  hypothesis 
is  false,  and  the  course  of  man’s  temporal  pilgrimage  is 
not  the  fatal  rattling  off  of  the  links  in  the  chains  that  bind 
him  fatally  in  the  iron  meshes  of  the  web  of  time.  Then 
God,  who  determines  and  foresees  all  the  possibilities  of 
choice  open  to  man  at  all  times,  God,  who  determines  the 
fundamental  directions  of  time  and  history,  does  not  wholly 
predetermine  the  acts  of  individual  wills  and  cannot 
wholly  foresee  which  wav  his  human  child  will  always 
elect  to  go.  Then  man’s  future,  in  its  concrete  and  living 
actuality,  cannot  be  known  to  God  in  precisely  the  same 
way  as  is  his  past.  God  can  know  the  real  possibilities  of 
the  future,  but  not  the  actualities  which  are  not  yet  actual. 
He  cannot  now  know  my  future  in  the  same  way  in  which 
he  knows  my  present.  Then  there  is  an  element  of  spon- 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


342 


taneity,  of  novelty,  of  creativeness  in  the  life  of  man,  and 
possibly  of  other  finite  selves.  Subject  to  the  directing 
creative  purpose  of  God’s  enduring  will,  there  is  creative 
freedom  of  self-determination  for  some  of  his  creatures. 
As  James  Ward  puts  it,  God  creates  creators,  and,  if  he 
does  I  would  add,  he  must  conserve  the  fruits  of  their 
creativeness  in  the  spiritual  order.  Such,  as  I  understand 
them,  are  the  final  religious  implications  of  temporalism — 
a  dynamic  universe  of  orderly  spiritual  creativity,  reality 
a  society  of  selves  moving  towards  richer  harmony  of 
rational  and  coherent  spiritual  personalities,  the  real  world 
a  society  or  Republic  of  Selves — the  Republic  of  God. 
These  problems  are  discussed  further  in  Chapter  XXIV. 

References 

*  Bergson,  H.,  Creative  Evolution;  Introduction  to  Meta¬ 

physics;  Matter  and  Memory;  Mind-Energy ;  Time  and 
Free  Will. 

*  Carr,  H.  W.,  Bergson,  the  Philosopher  of  Change. 

•James,  William,  A  Pluralistic  Universe;  Some  Problems  of 

Philosophy. 

*  Kitchin,  D.  B.,  An  Outline  of  Bergson. 

*  Leighton,  J.  A.,  Man  and  the  Cosmos ,  Chapters  XVII,  XXI, 

XXXV,  XXXVI,  XXXVII,  XXXVIII. 

*  Le  Roy,  E.,  A  New  Philosophy,  Henri  Bergson. 

*  Lindsay,  A.  D.,  The  Philosophy  of  Bergson. 

*  Lovejoy,  A.  0.,  “The  Problem  of  Time  in  Recent  French 

Philosophy,”  Philosophical  Review,  1912,  Vol.  XXI;  “The 
Place  of  the  Time  Problem  in  Contemporary  Philosophy,” 
Journal  of  Philosophy,  1910,  Vol.  VII. 

*  Miller,  Lucius  H.,  Bergson  and  Religion. 

*  Royce,  Josiah,  The  World  and  the  Individual,  second  series, 

Nature,  Man  and  the  Moral  Order. 

Ruhe,  Algot,  and  Paul,  Nancy  M.,  Henri  Bergson. 

*  Seth,  Pringle-Pattison,  Andrew,  The  Idea  of  God  in  the 

Light  of  Recent  Philosophy. 

Stewart,  J.  McK.,  A  Critical  Exposition  of  Bergson’s  Philosophy. 
Ward,  James,  The  Realm  of  Ends. 


CHAPTER  XXII 


INSTRUMENTALISM  OR  THE  NEW  PRAGMATISM 

The  philosophy  of  William  James  has  many  sides,  but 
it  is  not  a  unified  whole ;  it  could  not  be  called  a  system. 
His  widest  influence,  apart  from  his  great  work,  Principles 
of  Psychology,  was  undoubtedly  as  the  first  influential 
spokesman,  and  the  leader  of  pragmatism.  Briefly,  this  is 
the  theory  that  the  only  criterion  of  the  truth  of  ideas  or 
beliefs  is  that  they  lead  to  satisfactory  consequences ;  the 
sole  proof  of  the  intellectual  pudding  is  in  the  eating 
thereof.  All  sorts  of  consequences — emotional  and  prac¬ 
tical,  social  as  well  as  individual — are  tests  of  truth.  No 
ideas  or  beliefs  are  inherently  or  absolutely  true  or  false ; 
they  become  true  or  false,  are  made  so,  by  the  issue  of 
events.  The  pragmatic  criterion  of  truth  is  thus  bound 
up  with  the  temporalistic  conception  of  reality.  Reality 
is  always  on  the  move,  and  truth  is  the  apprehension  by  a 
mind  of  some  phase  or  moment  of  its  movement.  The 
detailed  examination  of  pragmatism  is  reserved  for  a  later 
ehapter  (XXX).  I  have  stated  its  fundamental  principle 
here,  because,  in  its  later  development,  frequently  known 
as  ‘ 1  instrumentalism,  ’  ’  from  its  stress  on  the  instrumental 
character  of  intelligence,  it  has  become,  under  the  leader¬ 
ship  of  John  Dewey,  one  of  the  most  influential  movements 
in  American  thought.  Its  influence  is  particularly  strong 
and  increasing  in  the  philosophy  of  education  and  in  social 
ethics  and  philosophy.  It  fits  in  with  the  practical  and 
energetic  temperament  of  the  average  American,  with  his 
disregard  of  tradition  and  his  lack  of  deep  interest  in 

343 


344 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


either  the  aesthetic  or  the  contemplative  life.  The  average 
American  likes  doing  things;  he  does  not  like  to  mnse  or 
meditate ;  he  has  little  interest  in  ultimate  problems ;  he 
shies  off  from  metaphysical  questions  and  he  wishes  religion 
to  concern  itself  wholly  with  “ social  service.”  Moreover, 
the  increasing  flux  and  confusion  of  civilization  confirms 
the  American  in  his  distaste  for  attempting  to  take  long 
views  of  things.  Instrumentalism  figures  in  the  popular 
magazines  and  weeklies,  even  in  the  daily  press,  as  no 
other  philosophical  standpoint  does  or  ever  has  in  the 
United  States.  Moreover,  it  seems  to  harmonize  with  the 
positivistic  spirit  of  natural  science,  and  with  a  civiliza¬ 
tion  dominated  by  things  and  passing  events. 

I  shall  give  a  brief  account  of  the  most  significant 
features  of  the  philosophy  of  John  Dewey,  since  he  is  the 
leader  of  the  new  pragmatism  or  instrumentalism.  Dewey’s 
chief  interests  lie  in  social  psychology,  ethics,  social  philos¬ 
ophy,  and  the  theory  of  education.  He  and  his  followers 
have  no  use  for  the  notions  of  anything  absolute  or  final. 
They  are  contemptuous  of  finality  of  any  sort,  whether  it 
be  in  ethics,  social  philosophy,  or  metaphysics.  Indeed 
they  seem  to  ignore  metaphysics ;  they  identify  philosophy 
entirely  with  empirical  logic,  psychology,  ethics,  and  social 
theory. 

In  connection  with  the  following  paragraphs  the  reader 
is  advised  to  read  Chapters  XXIX  and  XXX,  especially 
Section  II  of  the  latter  chapter.  Instrumentalism  claims 
to  be  primarily  a  theory  of  thought  and  knowledge. 

I.  Dewey’s  Conception  of  Intelligence 

In  instrumentalism  the  Jamesian  conception  of  the  flux 
of  experience  is  a  characteristic  feature.  Dewey  insists 
that  we  should  abandon  the  old  problems  of  the  relation 
of  knower  and  known,  the  self  and  nature,  mind  and  body, 


INSTRUMENTALISM 


o  |  rz 
OiO 

freedom  and  determinism,  the  one  and  the  many,  the  prob¬ 
lem  of  evil,  et  cetera,  and  turn  philosophy  into  an  instru¬ 
ment  for  the  better  organization  of  human  experience  and 
activity  by  making  it  a  tool  for  solving  practical,  social, 
educational,  political,  and  personal  problems.  The  time- 
honored  problems  and  theories  of  metaphysics,  he  thinks, 
are  evaporating.  The  truly  useful  and  creative  function 
of  intelligence  is  the  enrichment  and  harmonization  of 
man’s  individual  and  social  experience.  And  we  are  to 
take  experience  at  its  face  value.  Everything  is  what  it  is 
experienced  as.  But  Dewey  lays  great  stress  on  the  active 
organizing  function  of  intelligence  in  enhancing  the  values 
of  experience.  He  seems  to  regard  it  as  the  chief  instru¬ 
ment  of  human  progress  and  individual,  as  well  as  social, 
welfare.  Thus,  while  James  seeks  pragmatic  justification 
for  the  contemplative  side  of  life  as  found  in  religion,  espe¬ 
cially  in  mysticism,  Dewey’s  standpoint  is  more  that  of  a 
crusader  on  behalf  of  the  practical,  and  especially  the 
social,  efficacy  of  intelligence.  Bergson  reduces  intelligence 
to  the  level  of  a  mere  tool  for  action  on  matter  and  has 
recourse  to  intuition  to  satisfy  man’s  passion  to  experience 
reality.  Dewey  elevates  intelligence  to  the  place  of  the 
supreme  instrument  which  will  enrich  the  whole  of  human 
life,  while  he  seems  to  deny  the  value  for  life  of  the  inves¬ 
tigation  of  the  classical  problems  and  theories  of  philosophy 
in  the  past. 

In  short,  while  for  James,  Bergson,  and  Dewey,  reality 
is  flux,  and  intelligence  is  a  biological  instrument  to  im¬ 
prove  human  behavior  and  the  behavior  of  nonhuman 
nature,  James  and  especially  Bergson  offer,  in  immediate 
experience,  feeling  or  intuition,  a  way  of  escape  for  the 
religious  longing  of  man,  his  metaphysical  craving  for  the 
experience  of  union  with  the  universe ;  whereas  Dewey 
apparently  would  have  man  give  all  the  energies  of  his 
intellect  to  control  and  adjust  himself  to  the  flux  of  experi- 


346 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


ence  in  which,  he  lives  and  of  which  he  is  a  part,  thus 
relegating  the  problems  of  ultimate  reality  and  man ’s  place 
in  it  to  the  position  of  adolescent  dreams  left  behind  by 
the  mind  that  has  attained  intellectual  maturity. 

According  to  Dewey — “We  think  not  for  the  sake  of 
thinking,  but  as  a  stage  in  the  business  of  living.  Reason 
is  not  something  handed  down  from  above  to  constitute 
experience  rational ;  it  is  something  which  happens  to 
experience  under  certain  conditions.  ’  ’ 1  These  conditions 
are  always  conflicts  between  our  native  impulses.  So  long 
as  life  moves  smoothly  in  the  satisfaction  of  impulses,  there 
is  no  occasion  for  thinking  and  the  latter  does  not  occur. 
‘'The  business  of  science  is  to  analyze  the  given,  with  the 
intent  of  discovering  cues  to  action  more  dependable  than 
those  which  a  crude  unanalyzed  experience  can  supply.”2 
The  specialized  work  of  the  scientist  is  justified  solely  by 
his  success  in  supplying  tools  for  successful  action,  “know¬ 
ing  has  reference  only  to  the  future,  and  is  neither  a  con¬ 
templative  survey  of  existence,  nor  the  working  out  of  a 
timeless,  dialectical  process.” 

“And  here  comes  in  the  fundamental  motive  of  Dewey’s 
whole  philosophy ;  it  is  an  attempt  to  furnish  a  sound 
logical  basis  for  progress — progress  in  the  individual,  but 
still  more  in  the  social  world.  Pragmatism  is  an  experi¬ 
mental  use  of  intelligence  to  liberate  and  liberalize  action. 
It  looks  to  a  growing  rather  than  a  static  world;  thinking 
is  not  the  reduplication  of  reality  already  complete,  but 
the  actual  method  of  social  advance,  a  method  that  is  to 
free  us  alike  from  the  unchanging  ideals  of  obscurantism, 
and  from  the  spasmodic  demand  for  novelty  or  freedom 
working  under  no  principle  of  control  from  the  past.  It 
is  the  logic  of  rational  evolution,  where,  along  with  a  con¬ 
stant  alertness  to  the  novelties  in  the  situation,  and  an 

i  A.  K.  Rogers,  English  and  American  Philosophy  Since  1800, 

p.  390.  2  Ibid.,  p.  390. 


INSTRUMENTALISM 


347 


absence  of  undue  subservience  to  the  past,  the  new  is  at 
the  same  time  connected  with  the  old  in  an  orderly  and 
sober  fashion.  ’  ’ 3 

Reality  is  what  it  is  experienced  as,  it  is  the  whole  con¬ 
tent  of  experienced  process,  for  experience  is  always  a  flux. 
Thinking  is  a  part  of  the  flux  of  experience.  We  are  not 
to  start  from  the  assumption  of  the  independent  existence 
of  either  physical  things  or  selves,  either  minds  or  bodies. 
The  external  world  and  the  individual  self  are  simply  parts 
of  the  flux  of  perceptual  experience.  We  are  not  to  begin 
with  the  belief  in  an  individual  or  ego  who  knows  a  reality 
that  exists  apart  from  him,  and  who  acts  by  some  mys¬ 
terious  effort  of  will  on  that  world.  As  the  Buddhist  puts 
it — “There  is  no  self  or  Brahma  world;  constituent  parts 
alone  roll  on.”  The  self  exists  in  the  moment  of  self- 
experiencing  ;  for  example,  in  the  moment  when  I  feel  and 
value  and  choose,  I  exist  as  just  that  moment  of  feeling, 
and  when  I  cease  to  feel  I  cease  to  exist  as  a  self. 

But  what  is  a  self  really?  One  cannot  make  any  prog¬ 
ress  in  thinking,  even  for  practical  purposes  alone,  unless 
one  has  some  realistic  belief  and  conception.  Experience 
must  be  of  some  thing,  and  by  some  experient.  Even 
Dewey  is  forced  to  transcend  the  passing  moment  of  “pure 
experience”  (in  the  sense  of  William  James  and  the 
neutral  monists),  in  order  to  find  a  standing  place,  a  point 
of  departure  and  return,  for  a  theory  of  the  nature  and 
functions  of  thought  or  intelligence.  The  world  of  pure 
experience  in  the  philosophies  of  James  and  Dewey  is  like 
the  “thing-in-itself ”  in  the  philosophy  of  Kant;  without 
it  one  cannot  get  into  their  philosophies,  and  with  it  one 
cannot  stay  in  them.  The  place  occupied  by  the  self  in 
idealistic  systems  is  taken,  for  Dewey,  by  the  organism. 
The  conscious  and  rational  self  is  episodical,  but  the  organ- 


3  Ibid.,  p.  391. 


348 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


ism  with  its  neutral  mechanisms  is  an  objective  and  rela¬ 
tively  permanent  reality.  All  sentient  life  is  a  function 
of  the  organism.  Thinking  is  a  form  of  organic  behavior, 
like  walking,  swallowing,  and  digesting.  Thinking  is  a 
more  complicated  form  of  animal  behavior  than  these  other 
functions.  At  times,  namely,  in  critical  situations  when 
impulses  conflict  and  the  organism  is  “up  a  tree,”  think¬ 
ing  becomes  the  most  important  form  of  animal  behavior. 
But  since  it  is  simply  a  peculiar  complication  in  the  flux  of 
experience,  not  the  act  of  a  being  differing  in  character 
from  the  other  items  of  experienced  content,  there  is  no 
metaphysical  problem  of  knowledge  or  volition.  There  is 
no  really  significant  distinction  between  “inner”  and 
“outer,”  “mind”  and  “body,”  “individual”  and  “phys¬ 
ical  world.” 

Since  thinking  is  purely  a  practical  instrument,  not  the 
expression  of  an  agent  in  any  sense  ultimately  real,  the 
terms  “self,”  “soul,”  “spirit,”  “ego,”  lose  their  mean¬ 
ing.  There  are  no  ultimate  or  intrinsic  ends  and  values, 
since  to  suppose  these  is  to  presuppose  an  ego  or  self.  The 
ends  followed  are  problems  that  occur  or  happen  in  the 
flux  of  experience.  Life  cannot  help  seeking  its  own  expan¬ 
sion,  fulfillment,  continuance.  Agreeable  experiences  have 
a  way  of  striving  for  their  own  perpetuation,  and  disagree¬ 
able  experiences  of  seeking  self-annulment.  Therefore  all 
values  are  instrumental.  Value  belongs  to  whatever  fur¬ 
thers  life,  unvalue  to  whatever  hinders  it. 


The  fundamental  categories  of  Dewey’s  philosophy  are 
biological.  If  we  ask,  what  is  reality  for  him,  the  only 
approach  to  an  answer  seems  to  be  that  reality  is  what  is 
experienced  in  and  by  organisms.  Something  must  have 
experience,  must  do  and  suffer,  and  this  something  is  the 
organism.  To  the  question,  what  antedated  organisms, 
and  more  specifically,  neurally  endowed  organisms,  there 


INSTRUMENTALISM 


349 


seems  to  be  no  answer.  The  reality  of  the  world  thus 
implies  that  sentient  organisms  were  coeval  with  the  uni¬ 
verse — eternal  members  of  the  ceaseless  flux.  Thus  his 
philosophy  is  a  reduction,  a  watering-down,  of  the  funda¬ 
mental  presupposition  of  idealism  to  biological  terms.  In¬ 
stead  of  saying  with  his  former  idealistic  friends — “In  the 
beginning  was,  and  always  is,  mind, '  ’  Dewey  seems  to  say — 
“In  the  beginning  was,  and  always  is,  organic  life  and 
behavior.  *  ’  However,  his  increasing  expressions  of  sym¬ 
pathy  with  mechanistic  behaviorism  suggest  that  his 
philosophy  is  in  a  state  of  unstable  equilibrium ;  perhaps, 
his  antipathy  to  any  relics  of  dualism  would  lead  him 
to  say  that  the  organism  is  nothing  but  a  special  complica¬ 
tion  of  mass  particles.  If  instrumentalism  does  not  move 
towards  some  form  of  teleological  metaphysics,  it  must 
logically  become  a  materialism.  The  present  uncertain 
position  of  the  theory  illustrates  two  points — (1)  the  tran¬ 
sitional  and  unstable  character  of  much  present  philoso¬ 
phizing;  (2)  the  truth  that  no  one  can  set  out  seriously  on 
the  philosophical  road,  no  matter  how  he  may  purpose  to 
limit  his  interests,  without  arriving  at  some  sort  of  meta¬ 
physics.  The  problem  of  reality  will  not  down,  and  it 
cannot  be  waived  aside  by  any  amount  of  talk  about  the 
paramountcy  of  the  practical  or  biological  life.  A  meta¬ 
physics  is  implicit  in  every  serious  effort  to  think. 

II.  Dewey’s  Ethics  or  Social  Philosophy  4 

Ethics,  for  Dewey,  is  the  gateway  to  social  philosophy, 
and  social  psychology  is  the  key  to  ethics.  He  begins  with 
the  thesis  that  the  conduct  of  mature  or  socialized  indi- 


4 1  have  based  this  summary  on  Dewey’s  latest  work,  Human 
Xature  and  Conduct,  because  it  is,  in  many  respects,  the  best  state¬ 
ment  of  his  position  in  ethics  and  social  philosophy.  His  part  in 
Dewey  and  Tufts’  Ethics  is  very  hard  reading  for  the  beginner. 


350 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


viduals  is  controlled  chiefly  by  habit.  And,  of  course,  we 
are  concerned  only  with  individuals  who  live  in  society, 
the  isolated  individual  is  an  unreal  abstraction.  The  indi¬ 
vidual  at  birth  possesses,  or  rather  is,  certain  congenital 
capacities  or  powers  of  responsiveness  to  the  various  situ¬ 
ations  in  which  the  human  organism  finds  itself.  The  indi¬ 
vidual  does  not  consist  of  a  number  of  fixed  instincts.  The 
raw  unsocialized  or  uneducated  self  consists  of  a  number 
of  impulses,  which  are  very  plastic  or  modifiable  by  social 
patterns.  The  sex  impulse,  for  example,  may  run  the 
ordinary  course  of  courtship  and  marriage ;  it  may  undergo 
perversion;  it  may  be  “sublimated”  and  thus  discharge 
itself  in  art,  romantic  devotion,  religion  or  some  other 
form  of  “spiritual”  activity.  Impulses  are  blended  and 
irradiate  in  various  ways,  under  the  influence  of  social 
pressures  and  excitations.  The  common  notion  that  human 
nature  is  unchanging  is  a  fiction.  Until  the  native  impulses 
have  been  set  and  hardened  into  habits,  by  the  canalizing 
power  of  social  customs,  human  nature  is  very  capable  of 
change.  The  really  stubborn  and  unyielding  factors  in 
human  society,  those  which  prevent  change  for  better  or 
worse,  and  on  which  the  ultraconservative  relies  in  his 
defence  of  established  social  institutions,  are  just  the  insti¬ 
tutions  or  customs  themselves ;  such  as  the  usages  and 
laws  in  regard  to  property,  industry,  marriage,  et  cetera. 
Human  nature  seems  unchanging  because,  once  the  fluid 
impulses  of  the  biological  self  have  been  shaped  and  set  by 
social  custom  and  usage,  the  habits  thus  formed  are  hard  to 
modify.  The  habits,  which,  by  their  interpenetration,  make 
up  the  character  or  personality  of  the  developed  individual, 
are  the  resultants  of  the  incessant  play  of  custom  on  the 
original  impulses.  Persons  vary  in  the  relative  intensity  of 
their  native  impulses.  But  human  nature  in  the  raw  is  much 
the  same  everywhere ;  the  differences  between  persons  is 
largely,  and  the  differences  between  cultures  is  chiefly,  due 


INSTRUMENTALISM  351 

to  the  differences  in  social  customs,  by  which  habits  are 
formed  out  of  the  raw  impulses  of  human  nature. 

Habit  is  identical  with  will.  A  man ’s  will  is  simply  the 
system  of  his  habits.  If  he  have  no  unified  will,  if  he  be 
an  abnormally  divided  self,  that  is  because  his  habits  do 
not  jibe.  Thinking  is  just  as  much  a  habit  as  walking,  and 
is  molded  by  social  customs.  There  is  no  soul  that  thinks 
in  general;  “habits  formed  in  process  of  exercising  biologi¬ 
cal  aptitudes  are  the  sole  agents  of  observation,  recollec¬ 
tion,  foresight,  and  judgment”;  “concrete  habits  are  the 
means  of  knowledge  and  thought”  ( Human  Nature  and 
Conduct,  p.  176).  But  habits  do  not  know,  do  not  reflect 
or  imagine.  Intelligent  thinking  is  horn  in  the  conflicts  of 
habits  and  impulses.  Habit  carried  through  to  the  limit  of 
specialization  ends  in  thoughtless  action.  “But  only 
thought  notes  obstructions,  invents  tools,  conceives  aims, 
directs  technic,  and  thus  converts  impulse  into  an  art 
which  lives  in  objects.  Thought  is  born  as  the  twin  of 
impulse  in  every  moment  of  impeded  habit”  (Ihicl.,  p.  171). 
Habit  is  vital  only  in  so  far  as  it  is  animated  by  impulse, 
and  the  function  of  thought  is  to  liberate  impulse  from 
the  thraldom  of  ossified  habits.  Through  intelligence  alone 
is  man  able  to  free  himself  from  the  automatic  routine 
which  custom  engenders  upon  impulse. 

How  thinking  can  be  at  once  a  habit  and  the  liberator 
from  the  thraldom  of  habit  is  not  explained. 

Intelligence,  the  power  to  set  up,  coordinate  and  guide 
to  successful  issue,  conscious  aims  born  of  reflection  on 
impulse,  is  the  great  agency  for  the  realization  of  the  good. 
Dewey  rejects  the  notions  of  final  ends,  absolute  values, 
infallible  intuitions.  The  true  ends  of  conduct  are  the 
definite  concrete  ends-in-view  here  and  now,  not  remote 
and  abstract  ideals  or  values.  Means  and  ends  cannot  be 
separated.  A  good  means  is  part  of  the  good  end,  and  a 


352 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


good  end  is  simply  a  series  or  totality  of  means.  An  end 
cannot  be  good  and  the  means  to  it  bad,  or  vice  versa. 
Intelligence  is  the  power  to  devise  means  which  are  steps 
in  the  gaining  of  the  end,  and  also  to  generalize  aims,  to 
view  them  impartially,  and  thus  to  universalize  and  har¬ 
monize  them. 

Good  conduct  is  intelligent  conduct,  aimed  at  satisfying 
human  desire  in  a  concrete,  harmonious  and  progressive 
fashion.  The  good  is  the  progressive  increase  in  depth, 
multiplicity  and  extent,  of  the  meanings  of  life.  The  good 
is  always  unique,  never  to  be  exactly  repeated.  It  is  the 
best  attainable  meaning  of  every  single  situation  in  life. 
It  is  new  every  morning,  fresh  every  evening.  Each  mo¬ 
ment  has  its  own  possible  imperishable  value,  as  each  indi¬ 
vidual  life  has  its  own  unique  series  of  attainable  good 
moments.  Moral  progress  is  not  to  be  measured  by  approx¬ 
imation  to  some  remote  goal.  “Progress  is  present  recon¬ 
struction  adding  fullness  and  distinctness  of  meaning  ” 
(Ibid.,  p.  281).  Thus  morals  has  to  do  with  all  activity 
into  which  alternative  possibilities  enter  (Ibid.,  p.  278). 
For  wherever  there  are  alternative  possibilities  there  is 
occasion  for  deliberation  and  choice,  for  the  exercise  of 
intelligence  to  determine  how  meanings  may  best  be  real¬ 
ized.  Thus  moral  conduct  covers  every  act  that  is  judged 
with  reference  to  better  and  worse.  “Potentially  con¬ 
duct  is  one  hundred  per  cent  of  our  acts”  (Ibid.,  p.  279). 
‘  ‘  Every  situation  has  its  own  measure  and  quality  of 
progress”  (Ibid.,  p.  282).  “Progress  means  increase  of 
meaning,  which  involves  multiplication  of  sensed  distinc¬ 
tions  as  well  as  harmony,  unification”  (Ibid.,  p.  283). 
“Happiness,  reasonableness,  virtue,  perfecting,  are  *  *  * 
parts  of  the  present  significance  of  present  action.  Memory 
of  the  past,  observation  of  the  present,  foresight  of  the 
future,  are  indispensable.  But  they  are  indispensable  to 


INSTRUMENTALISM  353 

a  present  liberation,  an  enriching'  growth  of  action” 
(Ibid.,  p.  265). 

Since  morality  consists  in  the  intelligent  achievement, 
increase,  and  unification  of  the  meanings  implicit  in  im¬ 
pulse  ;  since  each  moment  in  life,  as  well  as  every  impulse, 
counts  as  one  inherent  value  in  its  own  good  right,  all 
dualisms,  all  two-world  theories  of  morals,  are  to  be  re¬ 
jected.  The  good  does  not  consist  in  the  sacrifice  of  feeling 
to  reason,  of  sense  to  “spirit,”  of  the  present  to  a  future 
Heaven  or  Nirvana.  All  popular  dualisms  and  super¬ 
naturalisms,  all  romantic  and  transcendental  idealisms, 
are  forms  of  the  same  fallacy.  Whether  the  good  be  con¬ 
ceived  as  a  Christian  supernatural  Heaven  from  which  all 
the  present  concrete  impulses  and  interests  of  man’s 
earthly  life  are  banished,  or  as  a  transcendental  Ideal  of 
Reason  which  is  contrasted,  as  the  eternal  self -identical 
life  of  pure  spirit,  with  the  concrete,  active,  changing, 
empirical,  individual  life,  here  and  now ;  or,  with  still 
more  logic,  as  the  Buddhist  Nirvana  into  which  one  enters 
by  the  cessation  of  all  desire  and  the  extinction  of  all 
interest,  and  the  consequent  total  annihilation  of  indi¬ 
viduality,  the  procedure  is  essentially  the  same.  It  is 
denied  that  there  is  inherent  meaning  and  value  in  the 
present,  actual,  concrete  situation  of  the  individual  here 
and  now.  In  all  these  cases  there  is  set  up,  “a  goal  of 
final  exhaustive,  comprehensive,  perfection  which  can  be 
defined  only  by  complete  contrast  with  the  actual”  (Ibid., 
p.  260).  Such  a  goal  is  a  chimera,  a  psychological  nonen¬ 
tity.  It  is  only  in  the  actual,  the  present  dynamic  moment 
of  life,  that  intelligence  can  find  concrete  meaning  or  good. 
It  is  in  the  concrete  transformations  of  what  exists  that 
the  values  of  human  existence  are  realized.  The  good  lies 
alone  in  the  progressing  and  harmonious  satisfaction  of  all 
the  concrete  activities  of  the  individual,  as  a  member  of 
society.  Instead  of  seeking  with  Faust,  the  romantic  ideal- 


354 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


ist,  some  perfect  future  moment  to  which  one  could  say — 
“Stay,  fleeting  moment,  thou  art  so  fair!” — Dewey’s 
injunction  is  to  use  intelligence  to  make  every  moment  as 
fair  as  possible,  by  the  guidance  of  every  impulse  so  that 
the  maximum  of  depth  and  harmony  of  meaning  is  con¬ 
tinuously  realized.  The  only  idealism  that  has  place  in 
this  theory  is  that  which  consists  in  the  idealization  by 
intelligence  of  impulse,  so  that  meanings  are  continuously 
achieved  and  enjoyed.  Thus  Dewey’s  conception  of  the 
good  is  empirical,  concrete,  relativistic,  and  temporal.  The 
good  is  to  be  found  in  the  intelligent  guidance  of  the  flux 
of  daily  impulses  and  interests. 

Since  intelligence  is  the  universalizing  and  objectifying 
agency  in  the  guidance  of  desires,  the  good  is  social  as  well 
as  individual.  Indeed  it  is  the  one  because  it  is  the 
other.  It  is  false  to  say  that  morals  “ought”  to  be  social. 
They  never  are  anything  else.  The  true  distinction  is 
between  better  and  worse  social  orders.  And  the  best 
social  order  is  one  that  gives  the  fullest  play  to  intelligence 
to  organize,  interpret,  and  guide  to  deep  and  harmonious 
satisfaction,  the  native  impulses  and  interests  of  humanity. 
Morals  ought  to  be  more  intelligently  social,  and  they  will 
be  when  we  have  a  more  adequate  science  of  human 
behavior,  and  when  this  science  is  used  as  the  instrument 
to  guide  social  institutions  in  such  a  fashion  that  social 
organization  will  afford  the  opportunity  for  the  individual, 
by  intelligent  self-direction,  to  get  richer  meanings  from 
the  process  of  living  itself,  by  ordering  and  integrating  his 
native  capacities.  For  the  individual  at  birth  is  the  whole 
of  his  impulses ;  and  the  adult  is  the  whole  of  his  habits 
and  propulsions,  as  these  have  been  able  to  shape  them¬ 
selves  in  his  social  circumstances. 

The  Kantian  and,  in  general,  the  intuitionist  doctrine 
that  goodness  resides  in  the  will  or  intent,  regardless  of 


INSTRUMENTALISM 


355 


consequences,  is  rejected.  The  test  of  the  goodness  of  any 
line  of  conduct  is  its  concrete  consequences,  its  total  effects ; 
not  its  economic  consequences  or  its  merely  material  con¬ 
sequences,  to  be  sure ;  but  its  effects  in  enhancing  the  depth 
and  range  of  experienced  meaning  in  human  life.  “Mor¬ 
als  means  growth  of  conduct  in  meaning.  #  *  It  is  all 

one  with  growing”  (Ibid.,  p.  280).  “In  the  largest  sense 
of  the  word,  morals  is  education”  (Ibid.,  p.  280). 

“Morals  is  connected  with  actualities  of  existence,  not 
with  ideals,  ends,  and  obligations  independent  of  concrete 
actualities.  The  facts  upon  which  it  depends  are  those 
which  arise  out  of  active  connections  of  human  beings  with 
one  another,  the  consequences  of  their  mutually  intertwined 
activities  in  the  life  of  desire,  belief,  judgment,  satisfac¬ 
tion,  and  dissatisfaction.  In  this  sense,  conduct  and  hence 
morals,  are  social”  (Ibid.,  p.  329).  Hence  there  is  no 
abstract,  and  eternal  Right  or  Good.  “The  belief  in  a 
separate,  practically  ineffectual,  ideal  or  transcendental 
Right  is  a  reflex  of  the  inadequacy  with  which  existing 
institutions  perform  their  educative  office”  (Ibid.,  p.  328). 
“For  Right  is  only  an  abstract  name  for  the  multitude  of 
concrete  demands  in  action  which  others  impress  upon  us, 
and  of  which  we  are  obliged,  if  we  would  live,  to  take  some 
account”  (Ibid.,  p.  326). 

Individuality  signifies  unique  connections  in  the  whole. 
“Within  the  flickering  inconsequential  acts  of  separate 
selves  dwells  a  sense  of  the  whole  which  claims  and  digni¬ 
fies  them”  (Ibid.,  p.  331).  The  life  of  the  community  is  the 
fit  symbol  of  that  sense  of  the  whole  which  liberates  us 
from  the  conceit  of  carrying  the  load  of  the  universe.  True 
religion  is  just  the  identification  of  the  “sense  of  the 
whole”  with  the  “sense  of  the  community.”  It  is  the 
ideal  of  the  community  made  the  key  to  the  total  signifi¬ 
cance  of  life  and  reality  (Ibid.,  pp.  331,  332). 


356 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


III.  Dewey’s  Theory  of  Education 

As  I  have  already  stated,  Dewey  conceives  the  function 
of  philosophy  to  consist  chiefly  in  fashioning  intellectual 
tools  or  instruments  for  the  furtherance  of  human  happi¬ 
ness  through  social  reconstruction,  and  more  especially 
through  education. 

This  is  the  burden  of  his  most  important  work  on  edu¬ 
cation,  Democracy  and  Education,  and  of  his  more  recent 
Reconsiruction  in  Philosophy. 

Knowing  is,  we  have  already  seen,  entirely  subservient 
to  conduct — to  doing  and  enjoying.  We  seek  to  under¬ 
stand  in  order  that,  by  intelligent  and  therefore  successful 
action,  we  may  become  happy.  The  surest  way  to  a  social 
reconstruction  that  will  make  general  happiness  possible 
is  through  education.  For  education  is  the  whole  system  of 
means  by  which  individuals  may  acquire  control  over 
their  own  natural  impulses,  by  bringing  these  into  har¬ 
mony  with  one  another  and  harmonizing  the  interests  of 
the  individual  with  the  interests  of  other  members  of  the 
social  groups  to  which  he  belongs.  Education  is  identical 
with  the  process  of  human  growth,  by  the  development  of 
the  individual  and  the  coordination  of  his  interests  with 
those  of  the  various  social  environments  in  which  he  lives.5 

Philosophy  is  the  theory  of  education  in  its  most  gen¬ 
eral  form  as  a  consciously  directed  process.  It  is  the 
formulation  of  the  social  aims  of  education.6  Its  function 
is  to  integrate  the  aims  of  living.7  Science  becomes  philos¬ 
ophy  when  it  becomes  a  general  attitude  towards  the  world. 
Philosophy  supplies  the  need  for  a  total  theory  of  action. 

Dewey  rejects  the  traditional  dualisms,  of  empirical  and 
rational  knowing,  activity  and  passivity,  theory  and  prac¬ 
tice.  In  particular,  theory  is  the  instrument  for  intelligent 


5  Democracy  and  Education,  Chaps.  II-IV. 

6  Ibid.,  pp.  383  and  386. 


7  Ibid.,  p.  379  ff. 


INSTRUMENTALISM 


357 


practice,  for  consciously  guided  action.8  “Education  offers 
a  vantage  ground  from  which  to  penetrate  the  human,  as 
distinct  from  the  technical,  significance  of  philosophic 
discussion.  ’  ’ 9 

Knowing  has  to  do  with  reorganizing  activity.  “The 
brain  is  essentially  an  organ  for  effecting  the  reciprocal 
adjustment  to  each  other  of  the  stimuli  received  from  the 
environment  and  responses  directed  upon  it. 7  ’ 10  The  adjust¬ 
ing  is  reciprocal ;  the  brain  enables  organic  activity  to  be 
directed  upon  external  objects  in  response  to  stimulation 
and  this  response  determines  the  next  stimulus. 

The  doctrine  of  biological  evolution  shows  that  the  de¬ 
velopment  of  organs,  from  the  simplest  organic  responses 
of  the  lowliest  forms  of  life  up  to  the  intelligent  responses 
of  man,  has  been  the  fashioning  of  finer  and  longer  range 
instruments  of  adaptation,  by  living  beings,  to  the  natural 
environment.  The  development  of  the  experimental 
method  is  a  further  evolution  of  conscious  activity  directed 
towards  still  better  adaptation.11  The  experimental  method 
has  two  sides:  (1)  Nothing  can  rightfully  be  called  knowl¬ 
edge,  in  which  the  conception  entertained  does  not  lead 
to  physical  changes  produced  by  our  activity  in  agreement 
with  the  conception.  2.  The  experimental  method  signifies 
that  thinking  is  successful,  and  therefore  true,  “in  just  the 
degree  in  which  the  anticipation  of  future  consequences  is 
made  on  the  basis  of  thorough  observation  of  present  con¬ 
ditions.  ' ' 12  Experimentation  is  conscious  intelligently- 
directed  response.  The  scientific  method  is  a  trial  of  ideas. 
“In  brief,  the  function  of  knowledge  is  to  make  one  experi¬ 
ence  freely  available  in  other  experiences.”13  In  habitual 
responses  freeness  of  adjustment  is  absent.  “In  other 
words,  knowledge  is  a  perception  of  those  connections  of  an 


s  Ibid.,  p.  389  If. 
10  Ibid.,  p.  392. 

12  Ibid.,  p.  394. 


9  Ibid.,  p.  383. 

ii  Ibid.,  p.  393  if. 

is  Ibid.,  p.  395. 


358 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


object  which  determine  its  applicability  in  a  given  situa¬ 
tion.”14  “Genuine  knowledge  has  all  the  practical  value 
attaching  to  efficient  habits.  But  it  also  increases  the 
meaning,  the  experienced  significance  attached  to  an  ex¬ 
perience.”  15 

From  this  conception  of  knowledge  Dewey  passes  to  the 
theory  of  morals.16  He  rejects  the  inherited  dualisms  or 
oppositions  of  the  inner  and  the  outer;  that  is,  of  intent 
and  act,  or  the  spiritual  and  the  physical.  These  are  not 
oppositions  but  two  ways  of  looking  at  the  same  reality — 
the  whole  physico-psychical  man.  So,  too,  with  the  oppo¬ 
sition  of  duty  and  self-interest.  The  interests  of  the  larger 
or  social  self  coincide  with  its  duties.  Thus,  the  social 
and  the  moral  quality  of  conduct  are  identical  with  each 
other.  The  measure  of  the  worth  of  all  phases  and  types 
of  “education  is  the  extent  to  which  they  are  animated  by 
a  social  spirit.”  Education  is  the  great  moralizing  agency, 
just  in  so  far  as  it  is  the  great  socializing  agency.  The 
human  good — what  a  man  is  good  for — is  the  social  par¬ 
ticipation  in  a  balanced  experience,  one  in  which  what  he 
gets  balances  with  what  he  gives.  And  what  he  both  gets 
and  gives  “is  a  widening  and  deepening  of  conscious  life — 
a  more  intense,  disciplined,  and  expanding  realization  of 
meanings.”  17 

All  this  is  admirable,  as  far  as  it  goes.  But  is  it  all? 
Are  all  values  for  the  spirit  of  man  to  be  measured  solely  in 
terms  of  their  social  utility  or  shareableness?  Is  the  indi¬ 
vidual  not  something  more  than  a  mere  social  unit?  And 
is  nothing  true  or  worth  while  which  the  individual  feels 
or  contemplates  in  distinction  or  isolation  from  the  crowd  ? 
Is  nothing  true  or  beautiful  or  holy,  except  what  can  be 
put  to  work  to  produce  obvious  social  results?  Knowledge 
is  indeed  the  most  useful  instrument  of  social  action. 


i*  Democracy  and  Education,  p.  396. 
is  Ibid.,  Chapter  XXVI. 


15  Ibid.,  p.  397. 
17  Ibid.,  p.  417. 


INSTRUMENTALISM 


359 


Knowledge  is  power,  but  is  that  all  it  ever  is?  Is  that  all 
beauty  or  the  vision  of  holiness  ever  are?  Simply  instru¬ 
ments  for  social  reconstruction!  When  we  shall  have  re¬ 
constructed  society  to  suit  Dewey,  what  shall  we  have 
achieved  ?  Millions  of  similarly  clad,  equally  well-fed  per¬ 
sons,  thinking  the  same  thoughts,  enjoying  the  same  amuse¬ 
ments,  feeling  the  same  feelings?  Is  social  reconstruction, 
through  making  intelligence  solely  a  tool  for  action,  and 
condemning  all  higher  yearnings  of  the  lonely  spirit  if 
they  cannot  be  shared  by  all  others,  to  result  in  the  mil¬ 
lennium  of  mediocrity  ?  Spinoza  said,  ‘  ‘  All  things  excellent 
are  as  difficult  as  they  are  rare.  ’  ’  The  instrumentalist  theory 
of  education  and  culture  is,  rightly  or  wrongly,  taken  to 
imply  that  all  things  excellent  can  be  made  easy  and  com¬ 
mon.  The  contemplation  of  the  history  of  humanity  and 
the  present  plight  of  western  civilization  incline  one  to 
side  with  Spinoza. 

IV.  Critique  of  Instrumentalism 

The  conception  of  intelligence  as  an  active  organizing 
principle  is  the  last  remaining  legacy  of  the  objective 
idealists,  from  Plato  to  Hegel,  which  our  newest  instru¬ 
mentalists  have  preserved.  But  surely  the  successful  oper¬ 
ation  of  intelligence  as  an  instrument  of  control  or  suc¬ 
cessful  behavior  in  a  world  implies  that  the  world  is,  at 
least  to  a  predominating  degree,  of  similar  structure.  Mind 
can  make  itself  at  home  in  a  universe  only  if  the  latter  be 
in  some  sense  a  rational  order.  A  philosophy  which  empha¬ 
sizes  the  supremacy  of  intelligence  as  a  practical  agent, 
surely  implies  a  teleological  metaphysics.  If  the  highest 
intelligence  be  the  best  guide  to  human  welfare,  then 
thought,  at  its  best,  is  the  most  in  harmony  with  the  uni¬ 
verse  of  all  our  human  powers.  Moreover,  it  is  a  narrow 
and  unjustifiable  limitation  of  the  function  of  human  intel- 


360 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


ligence  to  say  that  it  exists  only  to  exercise  practical,  tech¬ 
nical,  social,  and  volitional  controls,  and  to  invent  make¬ 
shift  adjustments  between  human  emotional  and  biological 
needs  and  the  daily  and  hourly  flux  of  experience.  The 
functions  of  consciousness  and  reason  are  not  exhausted  in 
meeting  novel  situations  and  controlling  behavior  by  a 
reference  to  the  future.  When  I  am  engaged  in  aesthetic 
contemplation  of  nature  or  art,  when  I  am  enjoying  the 
companionship  of  a  friend,  when  I  am  contemplating  the 
logical  symmetry,  beauty,  and  impersonal  grandeur  of  some 
scientific  or  mathematical  construction,  when  I  am  living 
in  some  significant  period  of  the  past,  for  example  Eliza¬ 
bethan  England  or  the  Athens  of  Pericles,  when  I  am  fol¬ 
lowing  the  career  and  feeling  myself  into  the  life  of  some 
one  of  the  race ’s  worldly  or  spiritual  heroes,  my  conscious¬ 
ness,  keen,  vivid,  and  expanding,  may  have  no  reference 
to  my  own  future  behavior  or  that  of  anyone  else.  The 
human  spirit  lives  not  by  deeds  of  adjustment  to  external 
and  future  situations  alone.  It  lives  deeply  in  pure  con¬ 
templation  and  free  imagination.  The  instrumentalist  errs 
by  taking  one  important  function  of  conscious  intelligence 
and  making  it  the  sole  function.  Disinterested  contempla¬ 
tion  and  enjoyment  of  the  beauty,  grandeur,  meaning  and 
order  of  things  for  their  own  sakes  are  for  some  human 
beings  inherently  worthful  functions  of  consciousness.  The 
philosopher,  like  Kipling ’s  world  wanderer,  is  moved  by  the 
passion  “For  to  admire  and  for  to  see”  the  universe.  To 
become,  in  however  modest  degree,  the  spectator  of  time 
and  existence  is  a  native  human  longing  which  philosophy 
exists  to  satisfy.  Nothing  is  more  truly  a  mark  of  the 
distinctively  human  life,  nothing  in  human  life  gives  more 
worth  and  poise,  more  inner  strength  and  unshaken  forti¬ 
tude  to  life  than  the  attainment  of  a  contemplative  insight 
in  which  the  spirit’s  thirst  for  a  reflective  vision  of  reality 
is  slaked,  in  which  the  thinker  becomes,  in  however  imper- 


INSTRUMENTALISM 


361 


feet  measure,  consciously  at  one  with  the  order  of  the  uni¬ 
verse.  The  truest  mainspring  of  science  and  philosophy 
is  not  the  discovery  of  “get-rich-quick”  methods  in  either 
industry  or  social  organization.  Philosophy  is  more  than 
a  good  economic,  political,  social,  or  even  pedagogical  tool. 
To  make  the  guidance  of  the  economic  and  social  life  of  man 
its  sole  function  would  be  to  limit  unduly  the  scope  of 
philosophy.  The  theoretic  or  contemplative  life  is  the 
crown  and  guide  of  the  truly  human  life.  The  rational 
life  is  the  coherent  and  harmonious  life,  in  contrast  with 
the  random  and  disjointed  life  of  blind  feeling  and 
impulse.  Universality  of  meaning,  harmony,  organization 
into  a  coherent  system — these  are  alike  notes  of  the  most 
true  in  science  and  of  the  highest  type  of  social  order 
and  individual  life.  The  mainspring  of  science  and  philos¬ 
ophy  is  the  quest  for  a  coherent  and  harmonious  life, 
including  a  coherent  insight  into  the  meaning  of  life  and 
the  nature  of  things.  Reality  is  more  than  reason,  but 
without  reason,  without  disinterested  contemplation,  with¬ 
out  a  life  that  seeks  the  reflective  insight  into  the  ordered 
totality,  the  coherent  organization  of  the  real,  the  deepest 
meanings  and  values  of  reality  do  not  come  into  the  posses¬ 
sion  of  man.  The  truly  human  part  of  man  is  the  rational 
and  spiritual  power  in  him  which  has  fashioned  and  is  ever 
fashioning,  out  of  the  materials  supplied  by  nature,  an 
objective  rational  order  of  social,  moral,  and  spiritual  life; 
and  which  creates  science,  art,  religion,  and  philosophy, 
not  for  the  satisfaction  of  man’s  belly  needs  but  in  order 
that  reason  and  the  creative  imagination  may  find  them¬ 
selves  at  home  in  the  spiritual  universe. 

The  danger  of  overstressing  the  instrumental  character 
of  intelligence  lies  in  covertly  assuming  that,  since  intelli¬ 
gence  or  reason  is  a  practical  instrument  of  behavior,  it  is 
nothing  more.  The  instrumentalist  d  outrance  condemns 
all  pure  speculation  and  contemplation,  all  imaginative 


362 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


musings  over  the  problems  of  metaphysics  and  theology. 
He  demands  that  philosophy  come  down  into  the  market 
place,  roll  np  its  sleeves  and  go  to  work  to  prove  its  utility 
like  the  farm  tractor  or  any  other  piece  of  human  inven¬ 
tion.  He  voices  the  severe  utilitarianism  of  the  practical 
American. 

The  instrumentalist  philosophy  has  been  embraced  eagerly 
by  radicals  who  would  institute  a  juster  society  by  over¬ 
turning  all  existing  social  institutions  and  putting  in  their 
places  the  dictatorship  of  the  class  conscious  proletarian 
minority,  as  the  first  step  towards  a  communistic  social 
order ;  it  has  also  been  embraced  by  the  near-radicals  of 
varying  degrees  of  remoteness  from  sheer  communism.  It 
would  be  unfair  to  attribute  such  views  to  the  leaders  of 
instrumentalism,  for  thev  have  some  sense  of  the  slow,  diffi- 
cult,  and  circuitous  routes  by  which  social  order  is  built  up 
and  human  progress  made.  Nevertheless,  the  radicals  and 
near-radicals  are  not  without  justification  in  employing  this 
philosophy,  as  better  adapted  to  their  purposes  than  any 
other.  Since  instrumentalism  regards  thought  and  all  its 
works  simply  as  tools  for  individual  and  social  progress ; 
since  it  stresses  the  fleeting  moment  and  the  endless  flux  of 
life  and  reality ;  since  it  well-nigh  ignores  the  fundamental 
problem  of  religion,  which  is  the  question  of  the  right 
relation  of  the  spirit  of  man  to  the  highest  Reality ;  since  it 
refuses  to  recognize  any  ultimate  and  intrinsic  standards 
of  value  in  the  conduct  of  thought,  the  control  of  impulse, 
the  relation  of  man  to  the  universe ;  finally,  since,  by  con¬ 
sequence,  it  can  offer  no  well-defined  criterion  of  social 
progress  or  individual  goodness,  instrumentalism  can  be 
used  to  justify  any  social  attitude  that  an  individual  or 
a  group  may  desire  to  identify  with  progress  and  the 
good.  The  class  conscious  moiety  of  the  proletariat,  the 
defenders  of  representative  democracy,  and  the  advocates 
of  plutocratic  governance  can  equally  appeal  to  instru- 


INSTRUMENTALISM 


363 


mentalism  on  the  ground  that  their  method  is  the  most 
efficient  tool  for  making  progress.  Unless  we  have  well- 
defined  standards  of  value,  in  regard  both  to  the  private 
life  of  the  individual  and  his  social  relationships,  “social 
progress”  becomes  a  dangerous  slogan,  which  can  lead 
only  to  a  social  warfare  in  which  the  ultimate  arbiters  will 
be,  not  reasonableness  and  fair  play,  but  the  force  of  num¬ 
bers  and  munitions.  The  militant  leaders  of  the  forces 
of  both  King  Demos  and  King  Plutos  at  the  present  mo¬ 
ment  are  good  instrumentalists. 

Just  now,  society  is  divided  too  completely  into  the  two 
camps  of  the  unthinking  reactionaries  and  the  visionary 
radicals.  What  we  need  urgently  is  the  vigorous  growth, 
in  numbers  and  influence,  of  a  thoughtful  liberalism;  in 
other  words,  the  increase  of  comprehensive  and  cautious, 
but  fearless  and  open-minded,  thinking  and  investigation  in 
the  social  sciences  and  their  applications.  Perhaps  this  end 
is  just  what  leading  instrumentalists  are  aiming  at. 

The  present  writer  has  no  faith  in  any  agitation  for 
social  progress  which  does  not  recognize  the  rational  and 
instructed  individuality  of  the  spirit  as  the  ultimate  stand¬ 
ard  ;  and  which  makes  light  of  the  teachings  of  man ’s 
cultural  history.  To  me,  history  teaches  that  the  only  sure 
ways  to  lasting  social  progress  and  individual  welfare 
lie  through  the  selfless  devotion  of  the  individual  spirit  to 
truth,  integrity,  the  highest  quality  of  workmanship,  and 
the  spread  of  the  spirit  of  free  fellowship  and  cooperation 
among  human  beings  who  otherwise  differ,  and  are  un¬ 
equal,  in  powers  and  functions.  This  devotion  cannot 
flourish  without  faith  in  the  supremacy  of  the  rational 
spirit  over  all  industrial,  economic,  educational,  and  other 
social  “systems.”  Without  a  religion  and  a  metaphysics, 
which  is  the  intellectual  interpretation  of  religion,  no  sec¬ 
tion  of  mankind  has  ever  made  progress.  I  see  no  grounds 
for  believing  that  civilization  will  extricate  itself  from  its 


364 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


present  mess  by  instruments  alone  and  without  faith  and 
sacrifice  for  something  higher  than  organic  ~behavior. 
When  all  due  allowances  have  been  made  for  the  changes 
in  cultural  conditions,  and  when  the  traditionary  excres¬ 
cences  that  encumber  our  inherited  spiritual  idealism  have 
been  discarded,  perhaps,  in  their  essential  insights  with 
regard  to  the  order  of  human  values,  Plato,  Aristotle,  the 
Stoics,  Jesus,  St.  John,  Origen,  and  Plotinus,  and  their 
modern  interpreters,  the  great  idealists,  are  not  far  astray. 

The  instrumentalist  challenges  all  our  social  institutions 
to  prove  their  humanistic  values.  lie  would  liberate  the 
human  spirit  from  the  thraldom  of  the  past.  His  pole  star 
is  a  better  social  order  to-morrow.  But,  as  yet,  he  has 
offered  us  no  definite  program  for  the  attainment  of  a 
higher  individual  life  in  a  better  social  order.  He  insists 
that  the  best  experiences  and  values  are  those  that  are 
shared.  But  by  what  proportion  of  human  beings?  In  the 
meantime,  social  unrest  grows  apace.  The  social  mechanism 
is  geared  up  to  cater  to  the  noisy,  crude,  commonplace, 
and  sensuous  life.  One  does  not  find,  either  in  social  ad¬ 
ministration  or  the  business  of  industry  and  finance,  any 
general  or  deep  concern  for  the  spiritual  or  ideal  values. 
The  life  and  death  struggle  between  organized  labor  and 
organized  capital  seems,  for  the  most  part,  to  be  a  struggle 
over  the  fleshpots  of  Egypt.  Neither  party  seems  to  be 
much  concerned  with  the  fate  of  spiritual  values.  We  lack 
leaders  who  unite  wisdom  and  courage.  Many  of  them 
seem  to  hearken,  not  to  their  own  rational  consciences, 
but  to  the  voices  of  the  clique  or  the  group  interest.  The 
notes  of  distinction  do  not  grow  stronger  in  our  letters, 
art,  or  education. 

The  value  of  an  instrument  consists  in  what  it  is  good 
for.  In  its  own  terms,  what  are  the  “ practical  fruits” 
of  the  instrumentalist  philosophy?  Is  it  aiding  in  the 
prevalent  dissolution  of  our  inherited  ideals  of  aesthetic, 


INSTRUMENTALISM 


365 


intellectual,  moral,  and  spiritual  culture?  Or,  accepting* 
this  dissolution  as  inevitable,  is  it  striving  to  put  new  goods 
in  their  places  ?  And  what  does  it  put  in  their  places  ?  My 
questions  are  put  in  no  carping  spirit. 

It  is  right  to  insist  that  the  present,  the  here-now,  should 
be  filled  with  meaning ;  not  sacrificed  to  some  abstract  be¬ 
yond.  This  is  precisely  the  attitude  of  all  sane  idealism. 
The  idealist  finds  meaning  and  value  in  the  present  by 
joining  it  up  with  the  realm  of  objective  spiritual  values 
which  transcend  every  momentary  here-now.  The  issue  is 
this — how  may  the  present  life  gain  true  richness,  breadth, 
depth  and  harmony?  The  idealist  answer  is — by  a  trans¬ 
formation  of  the  animal  present  through  transfusing  it 
with  the  spirit  of  devotion  to  the  transindividual  and  trans- 
momental  values  of  intellectual  and  moral  integrity,  spirit¬ 
ual  fellowship,  and  partnership  in  the  striving  for  beauty 
and  truth.  Is  this  what  the  instrumentalist  means?  If 
it  is,  why  does  he  take  such  a  condescending  attitude  to¬ 
wards  the  high  peaks  in  the  spiritual  history  of  the  human 
race  ? 

Notwithstanding  its  continual  emphasis  on  the  value  of 
the  concrete,  the  ‘  ‘  here-now,  ’ 9  instrumentalism  is  a  most 
abstract  philosophy.  The  instrumentalist  tells  us  that  the 
values  of  life  and  experience  consist  of  the  “meanings”  to 
be  distilled  from  the  present.  But  he  does  not  give  us  the 
slightest  hint  as  to  just  what  meanings,  what  values,  con¬ 
tribute  to  the  present  fruition  of  life.  He  surely  cannot 
mean  just  a  life  of  momentary  impulse,  one  that  never  looks 
before  and  after.  For  it  is  a  pretty  notorious  fact  that 
satisfaction  is  not  found  by  human  beings  in  this  sort  of 
jazzlike  existence.  What  then  does  the  instrumentalist 
mean  by  the  enrichment  of  the  present  with  meanings? 
What  does  he  offer  as  a  substitute  for  the  life-views  of,  say, 
a  Christian  or  a  Hebrew  ? 

The  instrumentalist  would  exalt  individuality.  But  what 


366 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


is  genuine  individuality?  It  is  realized  by  a  strenuous 
and  selfless  devotion  to  spiritual  ideals — to  justice,  integ¬ 
rity,  and  spiritual  fellowship,  in  the  service  of  those  values 
that  lift  a  man  above  the  moment  and  out  of  his  animal 
selfhood.  Are  we  getting,  by  our  prodigious  educational 
activity  and  talk,  a  greater  or  a  lesser  proportion  of  wise, 
noble,  and  courageous  individuals  in  our  democracy  ?  The 
instrumentalist  rightly  stresses  the  supreme  importance 
of  education.  He  makes  education  the  one  good  key  to 
individual  happiness,  social  welfare,  and  progress.  It  is 
to  supply  individual  guidance,  social  polity  and  religion. 
I  share  his  faith  in  education  as  the  one  safe  and  effective 
means  of  social  progress.  But  I  question  whether  the 
“new  education”  is  educating!  It  is  part  of  the  present 
mechanistic  superstition  to  believe  that  moral  character, 
intellectual  power  and  ripeness  of  insight,  can  be  “spoon 
fed”  into  the  young,  if  only  we  have  the  right  “system.” 
And  we  are  to  get  this  system  by  an  application  of  the 
“science  of  human  behavior,”  that  is,  psychology.  But 
such  a  science,  pursued  in  indifference  to  the  lessons  of 
man’s  cultural  history,  will  tend  to  turn  us  into  noisy 
and  commonplace  machines,  varying  in  our  impulses  but 
echoing  the  same  thoughtless  ignorance  of  the  higher 
values  and  standards  of  human  life.  What  we  need  is 
not  so  much  a  new  system  of  pedagogical  theory,  as  a 
renewed  recognition  of  the  fact  that  all  the  elements  of 
education,  culture,  power,  wisdom,  strength  of  character, 
are  won  only  by  the  arduous  efforts  of  the  individual 
expended  in  assimilating  and  turning  into  vital  possession 
and  use,  the  cultural  goods  that  have  survived  the  storms 
of  time.  It  is  a  crime  against  youth  and  the  future  to 
cram  the  young  with  the  raw  or  half-baked  heaps  of 
data  and  untested  speculation  of  yesterday  and  the  day 
before.  All  genuine  education  is  self-education,  the 
struggle  of  the  growing  mind  to  penetrate  something  of 


INSTRUMENTALISM 


367 


the  meaning  of  those  things  that  have  endured.  What 
our  distressed  time  needs  is  more  superior  individuals  in 
positions  of  public  service — individuals  whose  exceptional 
native  intellectual  and  moral  endowments  have  been 
matured  by  a  liberal  humanistic  and  scientific  education, 
in  which  stress  has  been  laid  on  the  individual ’s  own  efforts ; 
and  who  are  inspired  with  that  fine  and  discriminating 
sense  of  spiritual  values,  which  comes  only  from  intimate 
and  reverent  communion  with  the  heroes  of  man’s  spiritual 
history.  We  need,  in  place  of  the  new  education,  a  renewal 
of  emphasis  on  hard  work  and  individual  responsibility  and 
initiative. 

Perhaps  this  is  just  what  the  instrumentalists  mean  by 
the  new  education.  I  have  not  been  able  to  discover  from 
their  critical  appraisals,  largely  depreciatory,  of  the  works 
of  culture  and  education  up  to  the  present,  what  they  mean 
by  the  new  education. 

Nor  can  I  admit  that  any  democratic  program  of  educa¬ 
tion  will  prove  a  sufficient  substitute  for  the  personal  orien¬ 
tation  of  the  individual  towards  the  ultimate  meaning  and 
value  of  reality — an  orientation  by  wTay  of  either  religion 
or  metaphysics.  Educational  processes  may  facilitate  this 
individual  self-discovery  through  the  discovery  of  his  true 
relation  to  reality.  But  the  new  birth  which  is  a  finding  of 
one’s  real  center  and  relationships,  a  coming  to  one’s  self, 
is  essentially  a  process  that  belongs  to  what  J.  H.  Newman 
called  “the  individuality  of  the  soul.” 

I  heartily  agree  that  there  is  but  one  universe,  and  that, 
for  us  the  meanings  of  life  and  nature  must  be  found 
here  and  now,  or  not  at  all.  But  I  insist  that  the  one  uni¬ 
verse  has  diverse  dimensions  and  planes  of  value.  The 
creation  and  enjoyment  of  beauty  for  its  own  sake  in  nature 
and  in  man,  and  that  disinterested  union  with  the  universe 
which  is  the  quintessence  of  metaphysics,  and  spiritual 
religion  and  the  higher  poetry,  which  is  the  finer  breath 


368 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 

and  essence  of  all  knowledge ;  all  these  are  forms  of  value 
which  give  grace  and  beauty  to  life’s  unquiet  dream. 

I  must  say,  further,  that  the  choicest  goods  are  not 
accessible  to  all  spirits,  are  not  those  of  the  common  market¬ 
place  and  the  popular  taste.  In  his  passion  for  raising  the 
spiritual  level  of  the  democracy,  the  instrumentalist  over¬ 
looks  the  fundamental  truth  to  which  the  choicest  spirits 
from  Plato,  through  Spinoza,  Shakespeare,  and  Goethe,  to 
Nietzsche,  have  borne  witness:  Narrow  is  the  way  and 
straight  the  gate  that  leadeth  to  the  highest  values.  Few 
there  be  that  enter  therein.  Many  are  called  but  few  are 
chosen.  May  many  more  be  chosen  in  a  juster  social  order ! 
Nevertheless,  the  history  of  humanity  does  not  support  the 
assumption  that  an  economic  and  industrial  millennium 
would  inevitably  see  all  souls  pressing  eagerly  into  the 
inner  temple  to  worship  at  the  shrines  of  beauty  and 
spiritual  perfection — the  twin  forms  of  the  good. 

References 

Bawden,  H.  H.,  Principles  of  Pragmatism. 

*  Bode,  B.  H.,  Essentials  of  Educational  Theory. 

*  Dewey,  John,  Democracy  and  Education ;  Ethics  (with  J.  H. 

Tufts) ;  How  We  Think;  Human  Nature  and  Conduct ; 
Reconstruction  in  Philosophy ;  School  and  Society;  Studies 
in  Logical  Theory. 

*  Dewey,  and  others,  Creative  Intelligence. 

*  James,  William,  Pragmatism. 

Moore,  A.  W.,  Pragmatism  and  Its  Critics. 

Schiller,  F.  C.  S.,  Humanism ;  Studies  in  Humanism. 


PART  III 


AN  OUTLINE  OF  THE  CHIEF  PROBLEMS  OF 
CONSTRUCTIVE  PHILOSOPHY 


CHAPTER  XXIII 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  EVOLUTION  AND  TELEOLOGY 

I.  The  Rise  of  the  Doctrine  of  Evolution 

Metaphysics  or  Philosophical  System  is  the  systematic 
and  critical  inquiry  into  the  fundamental  problems  of 
philosophical  thought.  A  system  of  metaphysics  or  phi¬ 
losophy  is  simply  the  organization  of  the  results  of  a 
comprehensive  and  penetrating  investigation  of  all  the 
fundamental  problems  of  thought  and  existence.  A  be¬ 
ginner  must  not  be  in  haste,  nor  expect  to  reach  a  meta¬ 
physics  by  the  study  of  one  course  and  a  few  books.  He 
must  first  survey  carefully  all  the  problems,  and  weigh  the 
chief  theories  thereon.  As  a  preparation  for  such  an 
inquiry,  we  shall  now  take  up,  in  this  order,  the  chief 
problems  of  constructive  philosophy,  with  especial  reference 
to  their  present  status.  These  are — Evolution  and  Teleology , 
The  One  and  the  Many ,  The  Self ,  The  Problems  of  Ethics, 
The  Status  of  Values,  The  Meaning  of  History,  and  the 
Problem  of  Knowledge. 

The  theory  of  the  evolution  of  living  species  by  natural 
causes  has  wrought  such  a  transformation  in  all  depart¬ 
ments  of  human  thought  that  one  can  best  begin  a  study 
of  the  live  issues  in  philosophy  to-day  by  a  consideration 
of  the  bearings  of  the  theory  on  philosophy. 

The  theory  of  evolution  is  as  old  as  Greek  philosophy, 
but  it  was  not  until  the  nineteenth  century  that  the  doctrine 
of  biological  evolution  became  the  most  deeply  influential 

and  far-reaching  of  all  scientific  conceptions.  During  the 

371 


372 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


sixteenth,  seventeenth,  and  eighteenth  centuries,  the  concepts 
of  mathematics  and  mechanics  were  dominant ;  but  since 
1850  these  have  gradually  been  made  subordinate  to  the 
notion  of  evolution.  This  change  is  the  result  of  the  work 
of  Lamarck,  Darwin,  Wallace,  Huxley,  and  others.  The 
labors  of  these  investigators  carried  the  concept  of  evolu¬ 
tion  over  from  the  status  of  a  speculation  to  its  present 
status  as  a  well-established  scientific  theory.  Thev  adduced 
a  great  mass  of  evidence  which  sustained  both  the  fact 
and  the  methods  of  evolution.  L"p  to  their  time  the  pre¬ 
vailing  view  was  that  species  were  unalterably  fixed  in 
character.  This  view  had  prevailed  from  the  days  of 
Plato  who,  in  his  epistemological  language  in  the  doctrine 
of  Ideas,  had  hardened  species  into  fixed  and  permanent 
types. 

“All  things  flow,”  said  Heraclitus.  To-day  the  evolu¬ 
tionist  again  throws  all  things  into  the  flux.  Not  even 
the  truths  of  logic  and  mathematics  are  exempt  from  the 
influence  of  change,  according  to  the  thoroughgoing  evolu¬ 
tionist.  Evolution  means  change,  but  not  blind  and  chart¬ 
less  change.  It  is  change  in  describable  and  definable 
directions.  The  evolution  of  organic  life  means  the  descent 
of  the  more  complex  from  the  simple  by  the  operation  of 
causes  which  are  similar  to  those  observed  in  operation 
to-day.  This  type  of  describable  and  orderly  change  means 
increasing  diversity  in  the  parts  and  increasing  inter¬ 
dependence  of  the  parts. 

Herbert  Spencer  describes  the  process  of  evolution  in 
words  that  are  quite  ponderous  but,  notwithstanding  this 
feature,  they  neatly  express  the  state  of  the  matter: 
“Evolution  is  an  integration  of  matter  and  concomitant 
dissipation  of  motion ;  during  which  the  matter  passes 
from  an  indefinite,  incoherent  homogeneity  to  a  definite, 
coherent  heterogeneity;  and  during  which  the  retained 


PROBLEM  OF  EVOLUTION  AND  TELEOLOGY  373 


motion  undergoes  a  parallel  transformation.”1  In  these 
few  words  are  summed  up  for  us  a  description  of  a  process 
that  has  been  going  on  for  eons  upon  eons. 

The  evolutionist  begins  wdth  the  simpler  phase  of  the 
evolving  object.  He  makes  no  claim  to  be  competent  to 
deal  with  absolute  beginnings.  The  substance  in  which 
life  embodies  itself  invariably  involves  the  colloids.  The 
biological  evolutionist  starts  out  with  protoplasmic  colloids. 
The  colloidal  substances  differ  progressively  in  complexity 
both  of  structure  and  function.  This  diversification  is 
at  a  minimum,  not  even  apparent  through  the  microscope, 
in  some  of  the  lowest  forms.  Socrates,  in  the  Phcedo  and 
other  of  the  Platonic  dialogues,  has  given  us  a  caricature 
of  the  notion  of  evolution  as  conceived  by  the  early  Greek 
philosophers.  In  this  caricature  is  the  view  that  the  parts 
have  been  developed  wholly  independently  of  one  another 
and  later,  by  some  dens  ex  machina,  the  aggregate  of  parts 
has  been  assembled  in  much  the  same  wTay  that  a  modern 
machine  is  assembled.  From  the  modern  evolutionary 
standpoint  the  organism  develops,  as  a  whole,  into  increas¬ 
ing  diversity  and  interdependence  of  structure  and  func¬ 
tion  in  its  distinguishable  but  not  separable  organs.  The 
higher,  that  is,  the  more  complex,  the  organism,  the  greater 
the  degree  of  interdependence  in  the  parts.  There  is  in¬ 
creasing  interdependence  of  the  parts  of  the  living  organ¬ 
ism  as  life  ascends  the  scale.  We  may  cut  a  worm  in  two 
and,  partly  because  of  its  annular  structure,  it  develops 
into  two  worms.  We  may  do  the  same  thing  to  a  mag¬ 
netized  bar  of  steel.  Cut  the  bar  at  the  indifference  point 
and  we  find  that  we  have  two  bars  with  their  positives 
and  their  negatives  and  their  indifference  points.  This 
is  not  true  of  man  or,  indeed,  of  any  complex  organism. 
We  cannot  cut  man  in  twTo  and  have  him  develop  as  the 


1  H.  Spencer,  First  Principles,  Pt.  II,  Ch.  XVII,  ^  145. 


374 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


worm  and  the  magnetized  bar.  Thus,  increasing  differen¬ 
tiation  of  organs  and  their  functions  involves,  at  once,  in¬ 
creasing  cooperation  and  mutual  dependence  between  the 
various  organs,  and  increasing  power  of  adaptation,  by  the 
organism,  to  the  external  conditions  of  its  existence.  The 
higher  the  organism,  the  greater  degree  of  unity  and  inter¬ 
relation  between  its  parts  and  the  greater  plasticity  of  the 
whole. 

The  conception  of  evolution  has  been  extended  beyond 
the  organic  sphere,  both  below  and  above.  Geologists 
hold  the  evidence  to  be  indisputable  that  the  earth  is  the 
result  of  evolution.  No  other  hypothesis  is  adequate  to 
explain  all  the  observed  facts.  The  glacial  striations,  order 
of  the  rock  series,  fossil  remains,  and  other  phenomena  are 
best  explained  by  the  hypothesis  that  the  earth  has  gone 
through  vast  evolutionary  changes.  Paleontology  and  bi¬ 
ology  reenforce  one  another.  The  remains  of  fossilized 
life  in  the  geological  strata  correspond,  roughly,  with  the 
biological  scheme  of  evolution.  To  the  astronomers  also, 
the  most  plausible  hypothesis  to  account  for  facts  revealed 
by  the  telescope,  applied  mathematics,  spectrum  analysis, 
and  sidereal  photography  is  the  view  that  the  solar  system 
is  the  result  of  evolution.  The  nebular  hypothesis  with 
its  vortex  movements  in  the  cooling  nebulaa  has  been  sup¬ 
planted  by  the  planetesimal  hypothesis.  This  hypothesis 
is  only  a  more  explicit  recognition  of  the  gathering  of 
stellar  dust  around  certain  nuclei  and  their  development 
into  our  present  system. 

Above  the  development  of  the  organic  life,  the  hypothesis 
of  evolution  is  successfully  applied.  Consciousness  itself 
is  said  to  have  evolved  from  simpler  to  more  complex 
forms.  Psychology  explicitly  builds  on  the  conception 
that  consciousness  has  evolved.  Mind  has  evolved  from 
simple  sentience  and  blind  reaction  up  to  the  richest,  most 
highly  organized,  and  culturally  creative  type  of  human 


PROBLEM  OF  EVOLUTION  AND  TELEOLOGY  375 


mind.  The  evolution  of  mind  has  kept  step,  pace  by  pace, 
with  the  evolution  of  the  nervous  system  from  a  simple 
ganglion  up  to  the  most  complex  human  cerebrum.  Man’s 
own  history  is  also  an  evolution.  Humanity’s  whole  cul¬ 
tural  history,  morals,  language,  social  organization,  science, 
art,  religion,  and  philosophy  itself,  are  the  products  of 
growth.  It  is  a  very  interesting  fact  that,  before  the 
hypothesis  of  biological  evolution  was  developed,  Herder 
and  Hegel  had  conceived,  and  at  great  length  had  attempted 
to  carry  out,  the  notion  of  an  evolution  of  human  culture, 
thought,  social  institutions,  morals,  which  the  philosophers 
and  the  scientists  of  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  cen¬ 
turies  had  been  saying,  with  Hobbes,  Locke,  Rousseau,  and 
others,  were  the  result  of  invention,  but  are  now  agreed  to 
be  matters  of  growth.  The  old  concepts  of  sudden  causa¬ 
tion,  of  divine  creation  and  revelation  of  language,  culture, 
and  society,  and  of  the  origin  of  political  society  by  delib¬ 
erate  human  contract,  were  supplanted  by  Herder  and 
Hegel,  and  the  growth  thought  was  introduced  in  their 
stead.  Like  Topsy  in  Uncle  Tom’s  Cabin,  there  is  a  recogni¬ 
tion  that  things  have  grown  to  be  what  they  are,  and  that 
in  order  to  understand  fully  what  they  are,  and  may  be¬ 
come,  we  must  know  how  they  have  come  to  be  what  they 
are.  Philosophy  elaborated  this  point  of  view  and  suc¬ 
cessfully  applied  it  to  man’s  whole  cultural  history  before 
the  biologists  applied  it  to  organic  life. 

Evidences  for  Organic  Evolution 

1.  The  fundamental  similarities  in  the  structures  of 
skeletons  and  cells  of  all  vertebrates  are  a  witness  to  a  cer¬ 
tain  type  or  degree  of  continuity  of  all  vertebrates. 

2.  Embryology  has  indisputably  established  the  fact 
that  the  embryo  gives  us  a  telescopic  or  epitomized  recapitu¬ 
lation  of  the  whole  evolutionary  process.  The  embryo  of 


376 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


all  vertebrates  recapitulates  in  its  ontogenetic  history  all 
the  stages  of  the  phylogenetic  series. 

3.  The  existence  of  vestigial  organs  shows  that  they  must 
have  been  at  one  time  useful  to  the  organic  form.  The 
most  notorious  instance  of  such  an  organ  is  the  vermiform 
appendix,  for  which  the  biologists  have  struggled  in  vain  to 
find  a  use. 

4.  The  facts  of  geographical  distribution  of  flora  and 
fauna  can  be  accounted  for  by  evolution.  The  kinship 
of  the  flora  and  the  fauna  of  Australia  and  Papua  is 
taken  to  mean  that  they  were  once  parts  of  one  continent 
and  that  it  was  only  afterwards  that  they  were  isolated. 

5.  The  facts  of  paleontology  are  also  a  basis  for  this 
view.  Huxley,  for  example,  has  given  us  a  sketch  of  the 
stages  through  which  the  equine  form  has  passed  from 
Eohippus  to  the  present  horse.  Huxley  has  reconstructed 
this  series. 


II.  The  Method  of  Evolution 

The  doctrine  of  evolution  remained  a  philosophical 
speculation  until  the  nineteenth  century.  Lamarck  and 
Darwin,  both  of  whom  had  a  number  of  forerunners, 
were  the  most  original  in  formulating  theories  of  the 
method  of  evolution.  The  advocates  of  the  fixed  species 
view  had  challenged  the  biologists  by  asking  them  to  say 
how  evolution  can  take  place. 

Lamarck  pointed  to  the  facts  of  adaptation  to  environ¬ 
ment,  and  to  the  effects  of  use,  and  argued  that,  just  as 
organisms  now  develop  new  functions  and  thus  modify  their 
organs  in  response  to  the  needs  of  the  organism,  so  the 
process  of  striving  and  consequent  modification  of  organs 
has  been  going  on  in  all  domains  of  life  and  the  results 
of  this  process  have  been  inherited.  There  has  been  a 
transmission  of  acquired  characteristics.  The  giraffe  got 


PROBLEM  OF  EVOLUTION  AND  TELEOLOGY  377 


his  long  neck  by  reaching  high  for  the  succulent  leaves 
of  the  trees  and  the  tortoise  got  his  horny  back  by  striving 
to  protect  himself.  The  fish  got  his  light  ventral  side  as 
an  adaptation  to  the  upper  air  and  his  dark,  mud-colored 
back  as  an  adaptation  to  the  bed  of  the  stream.  This 
double  adaptation  enables  the  fish  to  escape  his  enemy, 
for  if  he  is  nearer  the  surface  of  the  water,  by  mounting 
upward  he  escapes  his  enemy  because  he  has  the  color  of 
the  upper  air,  and  if  he  chances  to  be  nearer  the  bottom 
of  the  water,  he  escapes  the  enemy  by  dropping  to  the 
ground  and  is  indistinguishable  from  the  bed  of  the  stream. 
Responsiveness  to  the  wants  or  needs  of  the  organism  and 
inheritance  of  the  results  of  successful  response  are  thus, 
for  Lamarck,  the  chief  factors  in  evolution.  There  is, 
says  Lamarck,  an  inherent  tendency  in  living  forms  to 
expand  and  to  enlarge  their  parts,  up  to  a  limit  set  by 
the  living  body. 

Darwin  and  his  fellow  workers  made  an  epoch  making 
contribution  to  the  subject.  Darwin  discovered,  and  sup¬ 
ported  by  evidence,  a  reasonable  method  by  which  evolu¬ 
tion  takes  place.  Darwin  took  note  of  the  fact  that  breeders 
selected  the  qualities  which  they  wanted  and  they  interbred 
those  individuals  that  had  these  qualities  and  thus  de¬ 
veloped  new  species.  They  bred  from  those  species  that  had 
the  characteristics  wdiich  they  wished  to  perpetuate.  The 
breeder  presupposes  the  variations.  What  in  nature  takes 
the  place  of  the  breeder?  This  is  Darwin’s  question.  His 
answer  is — natural  selection  in  the  struggle  for  existence. 
Because  of  the  great  fecundity  of  life,  of  the  frequent  varia¬ 
tions  that  living  forms  undergo  and  because  of  the  fact 
that  living  forms  must  struggle  to  survive,  those  types 
which  develop  characters  that  enable  them  to  fit  the  en¬ 
vironment,  that  is,  to  endure  heat  and  cold,  to  conquer  or 
escape  their  enemies,  to  get  food  and  digest  it,  survive. 

Mental  and  moral  evolution  are  to  be  explained  from 


378 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


the  same  general  standpoint.  There  are  fortunate  varia¬ 
tions,  in  the  shape  of  quantitatively  varying  mental  power, 
memory,  power  of  inference,  and  greater  perceptual  dis¬ 
crimination  ;  all  these  are  powerful  instruments  in  the 
struggle  for  existence.  Man ’s  moral  ideas  and  his  religious 
practices  are  types  of  technic  that  are  evolutionary  in 
character.  The  group  that  hangs  together  the  best  wins 
the  conflict.  And  moral  and  religious  beliefs  and  practices 
are  cohesive  forces. 

Since  Darwin’s  day  there  has  been  much  debate  and 
investigation  as  to  the  relative  importance  of  the  various 
natural  causes  of  organic  transformation,  such  as — the 
true  causes  of  variation,  the  degrees  of  variation,  (whether 
minute  or  striking)  the  factors  and  methods  of  inherit¬ 
ance  and  transmission  of  organic  characters,  the  effects 
of  use  and  disuse,  the  respective  potencies  of  germinal 
selection  and  selection  by  the  environment,  the  powers  of 
persistence  by  organic  types  in  the  face  of  changing  en¬ 
vironments,  et  cetera.  But  the  beginner  must  not  be  misled 
by  these  debates  into  supposing  that  there  is  any  doubt,  on 
the  part  of  competent  biologists  or  psychologists,  as  to 
the  truth  of  the  general  theory  of  evolution.  In  the  sci¬ 
ences  of  life  it  has  completely  displaced  the  doctrine  of  a 
sudden  and  miraculous  creation. 

The  Darwinian  doctrine  seems  powerfully  to  support 
the  view  that  all  the  changes  that  take  place  in  this  universe 
are  really  the  consequences  of  mechanical  motions.  The 
mechanistic  or  materialistic  metaphysics  involves  the  de¬ 
nial  of  any  directing  principles  in  the  world  process.  The 
defenders  of  teleology  argue  that  the  observed  adaptation 
of  organs  to  one  another  and  of  organisms  as  a  whole  to  the 
environment  could  be  explained  only  upon  the  assumption 
of  a  world-designer.  Naturalistic  selection  explains  these 
adaptations  on  mechanistic  assumptions.  Given  original 
variations,  all  the  rest  follows.  This  is  the  point  of  view 


PROBLEM  OF  EVOLUTION  AND  TELEOLOGY  379 


of  natural  selection.  Given  reproducing  organisms,  vary¬ 
ing  as  they  do  because  of  the  unstable  character  of  the 
compounds  of  C.  H,  0,  N,  P,  and  S,  the  environment  will 
do  the  rest.  This  selection  hypothesis  affords  a  very 
plausible  explanation  of  the  wastes,  the  failures,  and  the 
monstrosities  of  organic  nature.  The  great  optician  Helm¬ 
holtz  once  declared  that  if  his  laboratory  mechanic  should 
bring  him  an  instrument  so  imperfectly  constructed  as 
the  human  eye,  he  would  discharge  him.  Instances  of  lack  of 
good  adjustment,  the  cruel  and  wasteful  processes  of  nature, 
the  sufferings,  the  injustices  and  the  stupidities  of  life,  in 
which  not  even  the  righteous  man  seems  to  triumph,  are  ex¬ 
plicable  on  this  hypothesis.  Yes,  Bismarck,  if  the  material¬ 
istic  hypothesis  is  true,  God  is  on  the  side  of  the  strongest 
battalions  and  ultimately  might  makes  right,  and  the  good 
which  Plato  placed  at  the  apex  of  the  universe  has  been 
made  to  give  place  to  ruthless  might !  God  is,  then,  but  a 
misleading  name  for  the  blind  pushes  and  pulls  of  physical 
forces. 

The  advocate  of  teleology  replies  to  these  arguments  as 
follows : 

The  mechanical  theory  does  not  account  for  the  original 
organization  of  the  universe,  for  the  origin  of  life  or  the 
origin  of  consciousness  and  reason.  The  theory  of  evolu¬ 
tion  itself  involves  a  kind  of  teleology  which  is  more  than 
the  rubrics  of  mechanism  take  note  of.  We  are  here,  and 
we  are  purposive  beings  with  some  capacity  for  the  recrea¬ 
tion  of  the  natural  environment.  We  are  parts  of  nature 
— we  are  the  products  of  nature.  Thus  the  evolutionary 
process  has  produced  beings  that  in  part  can  control  it. 
The  human  mind  creates  new  conditions  of  existence.  All 
our  cultural  ideals  and  all  the  institutions  of  society  have 
been  postulated,  espoused,  and  made  real  by  human  teleo¬ 
logical  activity.  These  transcend  the  considerations  of  a 
merely  mechanical  struggle  for  existence. 


380 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


Humanity  has  established  a  whole  spiritual  complex  or 
set  of  conditions  in  the  creation,  out  of  the  materials  of 
nature,  of  civilization,  and  culture.  In  civilization  “nur¬ 
ture”  or  education  remakes  “nature”  or  biological  in¬ 
heritance.  This  is  the  creation  of  a  new  environment. 
How  different  is  this  conception  from  the  postulation  of 
Herbert  Spencer,  for  whom  the  moral  complex  is  a  matter 
of  increasing  the  mere  length  and  breadth  of  life,  and  of 
the  passive  adjustment  of  the  organism’s  internal  relations 
to  the  external  relations  in  the  physical  environment  ?  Not 
the  prolongation  of  life  only,  not  the  mere  uncontrolled 
outgo  of  our  prime  instincts,  but  the  creation  of  a  new 
Jerusalem  in  the  way  of  cultural  ideals  seems  to  be  the 
highest  characteristics  of  a  civilized  human  life. 

The  teleologist  insists  that  the  mechanist  is  incompetent 
to  account  for  the  origin  of  life,  of  consciousness,  and  of 
the  spiritual  set  of  conditions  that  the  race  has  created  and 
elaborated. 

III.  The  Mechanical  and  the  Teleological 
Aspects  of  Evolution 

Our  survey  of  the  doctrine  of  evolution  has  convinced 
us  that  the  old  “watchmaker”  theory  of  creation  is  dead 
and  buried,  so  far  as  contemporary  science  is  concerned. 
The  question  that  now  confronts  us  is  this :  is  there  any 
place,  in  the  light  of  evolutionary  theory,  for  a  finalistic, 
purposive,  or  teleological  interpretation  of  the  world  pro¬ 
cess?  If  this  question  must  be  answered  in  the  negative, 
then  materialism  is  the  only  rational  philosophy  and  the 
critical  and  constructive  arguments  of  the  previous  chap¬ 
ters  have  been  in  vain.  There  are  three  logically  possible 
positions  on  the  problem:  (1)  materialism  or  mechanism 
satisfactorily  interprets  the  whole  nature  of  the  world 
process;  (2)  mechanism  satisfactorily  accounts  for  much, 


PROBLEM  OF  EVOLUTION  AND  TELEOLOGY  381 


perhaps  the  greater  part  of  the  phenomena  of  nature,  but 
at  certain  specific  points  it  fails  and  we  must  have  recourse 
to  a  purposive  principle;  (3)  from  the  standpoint  of  phi¬ 
losophy,  which  is  that  of  totality,  that  is  of  an  integral  and 
all-inclusive  view  of  things,  mechanism  is  a  valid  scientific 
program  to  be  applied  as  far  as  possible  in  every  field, 
but  a  mechanistic  wrorld  view  is  quite  inadequate  to  an  all- 
sided  interpretation  of  the  world  process. 

Before  we  consider  this  problem  it  is  necessary  that 
we  be  as  clear  as  possible  as  to  what  the  mechanistic  stand¬ 
point  means.  There  is  much  confusion  in  present  day 
discussions  on  this  topic.  Here,  then,  are  several  different 
points  of  view:  (1)  A  mechanistic  metaphysics  is  identical 
with  materialism.  Everything  which  exists  and  every 
change  which  takes  place  is  the  purely  mechanical  resultant 
of  the  movements  of  mass  particles  in  space.  (2)  In 
scientific  investigation,  including  biology,  the  mechanistic 
view  is  a  canon  or  method  of  inquiry,  a  working  hypothesis. 
As  such  it  means  (a)  that  the  purpose  of  science  is  to 
determine  the  particular  “go”  or  “how”  of  every  thing 
or  occurrence  which  it  investigates ;  (b)  all  science  is 
deterministic,  therefore  science  cannot  admit  indetermin¬ 
ism  in  vital  phenomena,  since  to  do  so  would  mean  to  admit 
that  causes  or  conditions  identical  in  character  could  have 
effects  varying  and  hence  unpredictable  in  character,  which 
admission  would  bring  scientific  inquiry  to  a  dead  stop ; 
(c)  the  aim  of  science  is  measurement  or  quantitative  state¬ 
ment  of  its  descriptive  generalizations ;  to  admit  an  in¬ 
determinable  factor  is  to  admit  a  nonquantitative  factor. 

Most  biologists  seem  to  take  the  mechanistic  standpoint, 
and  assuredly  they  are  justified  in  using  it  as  a  working 
method  as  far  as  it  will  go.  Pushed  to  the  limit  it  means 
that  there  is  a  determinable  and  therefore  unvarying  one- 
to-one  correspondence  between  every  specific  physico¬ 
chemical  complex  or  configuration  of  molecules  which  is 


382 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


an  organism  and  the  sum  of  the  manifestations  of  vitality 
by  that  organism.  On  the  other  hand,  the  vitalists  (and 
their  number  includes  some  distinguished  names  in  present 
biology,  such  as  Prof.  Hans  Driesch,  Prof.  J.  A.  Thomson, 
J.  S.  Haldane,  Pawlow,  Prof.  William  Patten),  maintain 
that  the  experimental  facts  cannot  be  accounted  for,  un¬ 
less  we  suppose  a  nonmechanical  agent,  a  vital  principle , 
an  organic  individuality  functioning  in  the  organism ; 
that  the  regulation  of  the  life  of  the  organism,  repair  of 
injured  parts,  reproduction  and  other  vital  phenomena, 
all  presuppose  a  directive,  nonmechanical  agency.  We 
have  no  concern  with  this  quarrel  among  biologists  except 
in  so  far  as  it  bears  on  our  more  general  problem.  Me¬ 
chanical  explanation  should  be  pushed  as  far  as  possible, 
for  the  aim  of  science  is  to  determine,  with  the  greatest 
possible  degree  of  precision,  the  specific  conditions  under 
which  things  have  taken  place  in  nature.  This  is  just 
what  causal  determination  means,  and  even  though  it 
should  turn  out  to  be  true  that  there  is  a  one-to-one  cor¬ 
respondence  between  physico-chemical  and  vital  phe¬ 
nomena,  including  conscious  ideas  and  purposes,  this 
would  not  involve  materialism,  unless  it  could  be  shown 
that  the  physico-chemical  series  is  the  solely  real  series 
and  the  vital  and  conscious  series  merely  epiphenomenal, 
that  is,  a  useless  phosphorescence  thrown  up  here  and  there 
by  mechanical  motions.  Such  a  possibility  is  very  remote. 

We  might  attempt  to  disprove  the  assumption  of  mechan¬ 
istic  metaphysics,  as  Prof.  Hans  Driesch 2  has  done,  by 
arguing  that  specific  vital  phenomena  cannot  be  explained 
without  recourse  to  a  vital  principle  (which  he  calls  an 
entelechy  or  psychoid )  ;  or  we  might  proceed,  in  what 
seems  to  me  a  more  effective  fashion,  to  do  as  Bergson  does 
when  he  adduces  the  parallel  development  of  the  eye  of 


2  The  Science  and  Philosophy  of  the  Organism,  Vols.  I  and  II. 
See  also  his  Vitalismns  als  Gescliichte  und  als  Lehre. 


PROBLEM  OF  EVOLUTION  AND  TELEOLOGY  383 


the  Pecten  and  of  the  vertebrates,  an  identical  organ  fash¬ 
ioned  by  different  means  along  divergent  lines  of  evolution.3 
We  might,  with  Bergson,  point  to  the  complicated  and 
manifold  correlation  between  organs  and  parts,  to  the  fact 
that  minute  variations  must  persist  and  increase  before 
they  are  useful  in  the  struggle  for  existence,  that  adapta¬ 
tion  of  organisms  to  the  conditions  of  existence  takes  place 
and  increases  along  certain  definite  lines  (orthogenesis), 
that  there  are  useless  variations  (ornamentation  and  the 
aesthetic  sense  which  are  correlated),  that  instincts  seem 
to  be  remarkable  cases  of  unconscious  purposiveness,  and 
that,  finally,  it  is  only  through  supposing  that  organisms 
by  integral  effort,  that  is,  by  effort  involving  the  organism 
as  a  whole,  develop  greater  organization  with  more  suc¬ 
cessful  adaptation.4  These  are  all  important  considerations. 

As  students  of  philosophy  we  should,  however,  look  at 
the  matter  in  a  larger  light.  The  subject  we  are  considering 
is,  like  all  basic  philosophical  problems,  one  of  great  diffi¬ 
culty  and  immense  sweep.  I  prefer,  therefore,  in  view  of 
the  introductory  and  fundamental  character  of  this  course 
of  lectures,  merely  to  call  your  attention  summarily  to  the 
general  principles  involved,  so  that  you  may  have  points  of 
view  for  further  enquiry. 

A  mechanistic  metaphysics  of  evolution  falls  short  for 
the  following  reasons:  (1)  The  theory  of  evolution  is  a 
general  description  of  a  universal  historical  process  or 
temporal  sequence  which  includes  a  multitude  of  diverse 
features.  It  assumes  that  the  same  kinds  of  forces  that  are 
now  observed  to  operate  have  always  operated  in  the  world. 
Now  purposive  activities  do  operate  and  achieve  things  in 
our  world.  Humanly,  a  purpose  means  the  conscious  striv¬ 
ing  for  an  end  or  value,  and  the  effectuation  of  a  purpose 


3  H.  Bergson,  Creative  Evolution,  Chapter  I. 

4  Bergson's  Creative  Evolution  seems  to  me  decidedly  the  most 
important  recent  work  on  the  philosophy  of  evolution. 


384 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


signifies  putting  in  train  the  means  or  mechanism  that  will 
achieve  the  end.  Human  finalistic  or  teleological  activity  is 
activity  directed  either  towards  the  attainment  of  new 
values  (satisfaction  of  appetites,  wealth,  power,  knowledge, 
justice,  happiness,  harmony,  beauty)  or  the  maintenance 
of  values  already  attained.  Thus  in  human  life  there  need 
be  no  antagonism  between  mechanism  and  end.  A  mechan¬ 
ism  devised  for  one  end  may  indeed  defeat  other  ends,  as 
when  an  industrial  process  is  run  so  exclusively  for  the 
owner’s  profit  as  to  destroy  the  lives  of  the  workers  or 
injure  the  consumers  of  the  product.  But,  normally,  a 
mechanism  is  simply  the  most  successful  set  of  instruments 
for  achieving  an  end  or  value. 

In  the  life  activities  of  organisms  many  teleological 
functions  are  performed  without  conscious  prevision ;  for 
example,  instinctive  activities  such  as  flight,  repulsion, 
gregariousness,  and  sex,  begin  by  being  only  vaguely 
conscious,  and  after  having  been  satisfied  become  more 
fully  conscious.  Examples  of  adaptive  activities  that  may 
continue  to  be  unconscious  are  respiration,  circulation, 
digestion,  and  even  swallowing.  While,  then,  a  purposive 
activity  in  its  higher  form  has  its  inception  in  prevision, 
and  the  whole  process  of  fulfillment  may  be  accompanied 
by  consciousness,  it  cannot  be  gainsaid  that  a  great  many 
adaptive,  end-realizing,  value-producing  activities  are  un¬ 
accompanied  by  consciousness.  It  is  a  fact,  which  no 
theorizing  can  explain  away,  that  purposive,  value-produc¬ 
ing  and  value-sustaining  activities  are  now  effective  on  a 
large  scale  in  nature  and  still  more  in  human  society.  This 
being  the  case,  no  theory  which  explains  the  present  state 
of  nature  and  human  life  as  being  solely  the  product  of 
blind  and  insensate  mechanical  movements,  the  product 
of  brute  accident,  has  any  probability  in  its  favor.  A  world 
in  which  purposive  functioning  is  so  large  a  factor  cannot 
be  a  world  which  is  the  miraculous  creation  of  blind  chance. 


PROBLEM  OF  EVOLUTION  AND  TELEOLOGY  385 


If  one  were  invited  to  suppose  that  the  differences  between 
the  products  of  a  Shakespeare  and  those  of  a  navvy  were 
fully  accounted  for  in  terms  merely  of  undirected  physico¬ 
chemical  processes,  if  he  were  not  already  a  blindly  preju¬ 
diced  adherent  of  materialism,  such  an  one  would  smile 
incredulously.  To  ask  one  to  accept  the  above  mechanistic 
position  is,  however,  to  ask  him  to  accept  only  an  infini¬ 
tesimal  fraction  of  what  he  is  asked  to  swallow  by  the 
materialist.  For  the  materialist  or  mechanistic  philosopher 
invites  us  to  believe  that  every  achievement,  every  natural 
and  cultural  value  of  life  in  all  its  indefinitely  complex  and 
varying  forms,  is  really  nothing  but  the  blind  and  necessary 
by-product  of  the  mechanical  interactions  of  mass  particles. 

(2)  The  universe  of  experience,  as  we  know  it,  displays 
frequent  creativeness,  new  discoveries  and  inventions,  new 
creations  in  art,  letters,  and  industry,  new  forms  of  social 
organization,  original  human  individualities,  even  new 
forms  of  plant  and  animal  life  due  either  to  the  cooperation 
of  the  breeder  with  nature  or  to  nature’s  unconscious 
fecundity.  This  present  world  of  novelty  and  creativity 
in  beings  and  values  is,  from  the  evolutionary  standpoint, 
the  descendant  of  a  past  extending  through  illimitable  ages. 
The  evolutionary  story,  in  whatsoever  chapter  we  may  read, 
whether  the  evolution  of  solar  systems,  of  the  earth,  of 
animal  life,  of  consciousness  or  of  human  history,  is  the 
story  of  descent  with  modification ;  in  other  Words,  of  quali¬ 
tative  novelties,  different  beings,  the  evolution  towards  and 
of  richer  individualities  and  values,  the  appearance  of  man 
and  civilization,  the  growth  of  society,  language,  art,  indus¬ 
try,  religion,  science,  and  personality.  The  struggle  and 
the  push  forward  of  the  vital  impetus  (Bergson’s  L’elan 
vital)  never  ceases  to  throb.  Evolution  is  a  creative  process, 
a  cumulative  movement.  So  far  as  ive  can  see ,  its  issue  has 
been  the  fashioning  of  souls ,  of  rational,  self-determining, 
creative  selves  who  continue  the  process  by  giving  it  a  new 


386 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


turn,  that  of  conscious  cooperative  activity  in  the  realization 
and  conservation  of  psychical  values .  Such  is,  broadly 
speaking,  the  continuity  of  direction  and  purpose  which 
makes  the  evolutionary  history  of  the  world  not  an  endless, 
chartless  drifting  in  the  cosmic  weather,  hut  an  evolution. 

If  mechanistic  metaphysics  were  true,  this  whole  process 
would  be  inexplicable.  For  a  purely  mechanical  process 
means  only  the  external  interaction  of  parts  juxtaposed  in 
space,  a  system  of  interchangeable  parts ;  whereas  the  evolu¬ 
tionary  conception  of  the  world  implies  an  organized  and 
organizing  unity  of  process  by  which  the  different  phases 
and  stages  of  the  world  history  constitute  a  living  whole. 
In  a  purely  mechanical  process  there  is  no  place  for  quali¬ 
tative  novelty,  for  discrete  change,  that  is,  change  with  a 
difference.  The  continuous  process  of  evolution  involves 
novelty,  change,  which  brings  forth  differences ;  it  involves 
individuality  or  organization  of  various  qualities  into  a 
unity  and  the  production  of  new  types  of  individuality.  A 
purely  mechanical  process  would  be  reversible,  a  cyclical 
process.  The  process  of  evolution  is  irreversible.  Even 
the  history  of  the  solar  system  or  the  earth’s  geological 
history  is  the  description  of  an  irreversible  series  of  events ; 
much  more  emphatically  so,  the  history  of  organisms  and 
the  history  of  man.  The  maxim,  ‘‘history  repeats  itself,” 
is  but  the  superficial  fraction  of  a  truth.  We  are  justified 
in  contending  that  the  whole  evolutionary  process,  when 
viewed  as  a  totality  and  interpreted  in  the  light  of  its 
results  in  individuality,  in  organization,  in  the  creation  and 
enhancement  of  vital  and  psychic  values,  is  teleological, 
end-realizing,  value-producing.  Indeed  the  notion  of  a 
purposive  and  organizing  system,  such  as  we  find  at  the 
highest  level  in  a  mind,  or  better,  in  a  social  life  constituted 
by  the  interrelation  of  like-minded  but  different  individuals, 
gives  us  the  only  adequate  clue  to  the  character  of  a  con¬ 
tinuous  whole  which  develops  or  evolves  in  time. 


PROBLEM  OF  EVOLUTION  AND  TELEOLOGY  387 


From  this  standpoint  the  mechanistic  way  of  thinking 
is  valid  as  an  analytic  post-mortem  description  of  the 
conditions  and  general  features  of  particular  phases  of 
the  evolutionary  order.  Mechanism  uncovers  the  skeleton, 
but  the  living  and  evolving  universe  can  only  be  fully 
understood  and  interpreted  from  the  inner  and  appreciative 
standpoint  of  purposive  selfhood.  Mechanism  lays  bare 
the  means  by  which  new  results  have  been  achieved,  but  the 
forward  movement  of  life  and  the  universe,  by  which  novel 
results  are  being  produced,  mechanism  is  inadequate  to  see 
and  interpret.  Reality  is  life  and  it  lives  forward,  carrying 
with  it  whatever  part  of  its  past  is  really  useful  for  its 
future  creation.  The  mechanistic  and  teleological  views  of 
reality  are  both  true,  but  teleology  is  the  higher,  more 
inclusive  truth. 

If  reality  in  evolution  be  purposive  what  are  we  to  make 
of  all  the  wastes,  failures,  sufferings  and  cruelties  which 
we  find  in  nature  and  human  history?  Well  we  can  see 
that  much  of  the  pain  and  discomfort,  the  dangers  and 
obstacles  in  the  natural  order,  are  stimuli  which  incite 
organisms,  and  especially  man,  to  a  greater  activity.  A 
high  civilization  has  never  developed  either  in  a  tropical 
paradise  or  near  the  poles.  The  imminence  of  pain,  want, 
and  suffering,  incite  man  to  effort  that,  under  proper  social 
conditions,  is  joyful  and  successful.  He  makes  discoveries 
and  applications,  organizes  society,  develops  science,  educa¬ 
tion,  and  for  the  enjoyment  of  his  leisure,  arts  and  letters. 
Yet  there  seems  to  be  much  undeserved  and  useless  suffering. 
Because  of  the  social  solidarity  of  human  beings,  the 
innocent  suffer  for  the  guilty,  the  wise  man  for  the  fool, 
the  saint  for  the  sinner.  Social  redemption  or  improvement 
is  a  social  process.  Society  is  lifted  up  by  its  best  and 
wisest  who  strive  and  often  seem  to  suffer  most.  There  is 
social  progress  through  the  enrichment  of  man’s  cultural 
heritage.  So  far  as  concerns  the  individual  or  the  group, 


388 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


however,  ethical  justice  would  demand  some  sort  of  com¬ 
pensation  for  suffering  and  loss.  Admitting  that  the  imper¬ 
fection  of  adjustment  and  the  large-scale  character  of  the 
process  account  for  much  of  the  failure,  suffering,  and 
apparent  waste,  as  necessary  incidents  in  a  purposive,  living 
and  growing  universe,  it  remains  true  that  we  cannot,  in 
the  light  of  our  present  knowledge,  see  the  rationality  or 
justice  of  all  the  defects  of  nature,  taints  of  blood,  of  all 
the  natural  catastrophes  and  diseases  and  sufferings  which 
nature  visits  on  man  and  its  other  children.  We  are 
touching  here  on  a  large  and  difficult  problem,  one  whose 
full  discussion  belongs  to  systematic  metaphysics  and  the 
philosophy  of  religion,  and  I  can  but  hint  at  the  issues  and 
principles  involved. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  suppose  that  man,  in  his  present 
stage,  is  the  goal  of  evolution.  Human  life  here  can  hardly 
be  other  than  a  transitional  phase  (though  of  value  in 
itself)  in  the  development  of  the  supreme  purpose  and 
meaning  of  things.  It  is  not  necessary  for  us  to  be  able 
to  conceive  the  final  goal  in  order  to  have  the  right  to  believe 
that  the  highest  ends  and  values  that  we  can  conceive  and 
follow  are  essential  elements  in  the  fulfillment  of  the 
universal  meaning. 

The  wastes,  sufferings,  failures,  and  evils  of  the  world 
process  have  suggested  to  philosophers,  from  Plato  down 
to  Bergson,  that  there  is  in  the  universe  as  a  whole  an 
obstacle  not  of  its  own  creation  or  choosing,  against  which 
the  supreme  purpose  or  universal  will  to  life  and  good 
must  struggle.  In  Plato,  Aristotle,  and  Bergson,  this 
obstacle  is  a  blind,  unintelligent  matter.  In  various  religious 
systems  it  is  the  cosmical  devil  or  principle  of  evil.  In 
Hebrew  and  Christian  theism,  while  the  problem  is  not 
solved,  the  view  held  is  that  part  of  the  evil  in  the  world 
is  due  to  man’s  capacity  to  sin,  which  capacity  is  involved 
in  his  freedom  to  develop  into  a  self-determining  being. 


PROBLEM  OF  EVOLUTION  AND  TELEOLOGY  389 


The  possibility  of  moral  evil  is  thus  inherent  in  man’s 
vocation  to  moral  and  spiritual  self-education.  The  evils 
of  nature  are  regarded  as  part  of  God ’s  providential  order, 
which  incite  man  to  activity  and  which,  moreover,  have  no 
power  to  injure  man’s  immortal  spirit.  The  further  dis¬ 
cussion  of  these  theories  belongs  to  the  philosophy  of  religion 
and  systematic  metaphysics  and  cannot  be  undertaken  here. 


References 

Aristotelian  Society  Proceedings,  1917-18;  “Symposium;  Are 
Physical,  Biological  and  Psychological  Categories  Irre¬ 
ducible'?” 

*  Bergson,  Henri,  Creative  Evolution. 

Darwin,  Origin  of  Species. 

*  De  Lage  and  Goldsmith,  The  Theories  of  Evolution. 

Dewey,  John,  The  Influence  of  Darwin  upon  Philosophy ,  Chap¬ 
ter  I. 

Driesch,  Hans,  Science  and  Philosophy  of  the  Organism. 

*  Encyclopcedia  Britannica  and  International  Encyclopcedia, 

Articles  on  “Evolution.” 

*  Encyclopcedia  of  Religion  and  Ethics,  Articles  on  “Evolution,” 

and  “Life  and  Death”  (Biological). 

Haldane,  J.,  Mechanism,  Life  and  Personality. 

*  Herbert,  Sydney,  Principles  of  Evolution. 

Hobhouse,  L.  T.,  Development  and  Purpose. 

Huxley,  T.  H.,  Collected  Essays. 

Jennings,  H.  S.,  “Doctrines  Held  as  Vitalism,”  American  Natu¬ 
ralist,  1913;  “Heredity  and  Personality,”  Science,  1911. 

Le  Dantec,  F.,  The  Nature  and  Origin  of  Life. 

*  Leighton,  J.  A.,  Man  and  the  Cosmos,  Chapters  XX,  XXI, 

XXXVII  and  XXXVIII. 

Loeb,  J.,  The  Mechanistic  Conception  of  Life. 

Lovejoy,  A.  0.,  “The  Meaning  of  Vitalism,”  Science,  1911; 

“The  Import  of  Vitalism,”  Science,  1911. 

Merz,  J.  T.,  History  of  European  Thought  in  the  Nineteenth 
Century,  Volume  II,  Chapter  IX. 

Moore,  B.,  The  Origin  and  Nature  of  Life  (Home  University 
Library). 

Morgan,  L.,  The  Interpretation  of  Nature. 


390 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


Osborn,  H.  F.,  From  the  Greeks  to  Darwin. 

Patten,  Wm.,  The  Grand  Strategy  of  Evolution. 

*  Paulsen,  Introduction  to  Philosophy,  Chapter  II,  pp.  150-232. 
Romanes,  G.  J.,  Darwin  and  After  Darwin,  Volume  I. 

Schafer,  Inaugural  Address,  Nature,  1912. 

Sellars,  R.  W.,  Evolutionary  Naturalism. 

Seward,  A.  C.,  (Editor)  Darwin  and  Modern  Science. 

Thomson,  J.  Arthur,  The  System  of  Animate  Nature. 

*  Thomson  and  Geddes,  Evolution  (Home  University  Library). 
Ward,  James,  Naturalism  and  Agnosticism,  Volume  I,  Lectures 

7-10. 

Weismann,  A.,  The  Evolution  Theory  and  Essays  Upon  Heredity. 


CHAPTER  XXIV 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM  1 

(the  one  and  the  many) 

I.  From  Naive  Pluralism  to  Singularism 

When  we  say  cosmos,  universe,  or  world,  we  imply  that 
all  things  which  exist  and  all  events  which  occur  are 
interconnected.  There  is  a  unity  of  some  sort,  and  perhaps 
there  are  unities  of  many  sorts.  Yet  this  statement  involves 
the  recognition,  not  alone  of  the  interconnection  of  things 
and  events,  but  also  of  their  manvness.  There  are  many 
beings,  there  is  a  constant  procession  of  events.  What  then 
is  the  relation  of  the  manyness  of  things  and  the  unity  of 
the  whole  ?  What  constitutes  the  togetherness  of  things  ? 

What  kind  or  kinds  of  unitv  are  there  to  be  found?  Does 

«/ 

the  universe  in  the  last  analysis  consist  of  an  aggregate  or 
collection  of  discrete  or  discontinuous  beings?  Or,  is  the 
universe  fundamentally  a  sort  of  block  universe,  all  of  a 
piece  ? 

The  Pluralist  argues  that  the  universe  consists  of  a 
number  of  discrete  beings,  that  is,  that  the  universe  is  made 
up  of  beings  which,  with  respect  to  their  existence,  are 
discrete  and  separate.  The  Singularist  holds  that  there 
is  only  one  real  being.  This  one  is  the  all-inclusive  unity. 

The  one  remains,  the  many  change  and  pass; 

•  •  •  •  • 

Life,  like  a  dome  of  many-color’d  glass, 

Stains  the  white  radiance  of  Eternity.  .  .  . 

— Adonciis,  Shelley. 

i  Singularism  is  frequently  called  “numerical  monism’';  inas¬ 
much  as  “monism”  has  another  widely  employed  meaning  I  prefer 
the  terms  singularism  or  unitarism. 

391 


392 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


This  seems  to  be  a  very  abstruse  problem,  and  so  it  is. 
It  seems,  to  the  beginner  in  philosophy,  very  abstract  and 
remote  from  life,  but  such  is  not  the  case.  This  problem 
bobs  up  everywhere  when  we  come  to  think  out  the  funda¬ 
mental  problems  of  science  and  social  organization.  Let 
me  illustrate.  The  common  conception  of  physical  science 
is  that  matter  is  made  up  of  indivisible  units.  Until  recently 
the  atoms  were  regarded  as  the  ultimate  units,  but  lately 
the  atom  has  been  broken  up.  The  nature  of  these  units 
is  now  regarded  as  made  up  of  electrons,  this  being  an 
improvement  upon  the  old  atomic  conception.  Now,  whether 
it  be  the  old  atoms  or  the  new  electrons,  in  either  case  the 
assumption  of  the  physicist  is  that  the  world  is  built  up 
out  of  unchangeable  elements.  In  biology  also  we  find  the 
same  shifting  from  one  unit  to  another  as  ultimate,  but 
we  also  find  here  the  assumption  of  something  that  is  an 
irreducible  element.  When  you  have  your  unit,  the  question 
arises  as  to  how  these  units  are  to  be  related.  The  physicist 
sees  that  a  lot  of  entirely  separate  units  will  not  constitute 
a  cosmos,  universe,  or  world.  There  must  be  something 
further  which  will  account  for  the  unity  or  interconnection 
of  things,  and  it  is  to  satisfy  this  fundamental  motive  that 
the  physicist  postulates  the  ether  as  the  continuum,  just 
as  common  sense  postulates  one  continuous  space-whole. 
The  elements  must  have  something  to  connect  them.  There 
must  be  some  sort  of  ground  for  interaction.  This  same 
situation  is  evidenced  in  the  life  of  the  state.  Does  the 
state  consist  of  entirely  separate  individuals?  This  was 
the  old  “laissez  faire”  doctrine,  and  even  to  us  this  assump¬ 
tion  sounds  good  until  there  emerges  a  conflict  between  the 
individual’s  aim  and  that  of  the  general  good.  We  have 
here  the  same  duality  of  unity  and  manyness.  During 
the  late  war  many  a  pacifist  said:  “I  have  no  interest  in 
the  quarrels  of  Europe.  I  would  rather  be  a  live  pacifist 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM  393 

than  a  dead  hero.”  What  did  we  do  with  such  a  man  as 
this?  We  either  put  him  on  the  firing  line,  or  in  some 
way  forced  him  to  acknowledge  the  binding  nature  of  the 
general  good  incorporated  in  the  institutions  and  aims  of 
the  state.  Extreme  individualism  leads  to  the  total  disin¬ 
tegration  of  society.  Such  individualism  will  not  work. 
We  have  to  learn  that  the  state  does  not  exist  merely  to 
feed  us,  to  clothe  us,  and  educate  us,  and  in  turn  to  ask 
nothing  from  us.  The  working  theory  of  the  Germans  was 
that  the  state  is  divine,  and  that  the  individual  should  be 
completely  absorbed  in  the  state.  In  this  Germanic  theory 
we  have  an  extreme  application  of  the  singularistic  view  of 
the  state.  The  doctrine  of  the  absolute  supremacy  of  the 
state  has  been  held  by  many  political  thinkers  outside 
Germany.  Indeed,  not  only  political  rebellions  and  revolu¬ 
tions,  but  the  historic  struggles  of  state  and  church,  have 
turned  on  this  question.  Pluralism,  on  the  other  hand,  in 
its  emphasis  on  the  rights  of  the  individual,  when  it  becomes 
extreme,  develops  into  anarchism.  It  does  not  seem  to  have 
the  element  of  togetherness  which  is  indispensable  to  the 
formation  and  maintenance  of  the  state  as  the  necessary 
basis  of  social  order. 

How  can  we  conceive  rightly  the  relation  of  the  particular 
constituents  and  the  unity?  This  problem,  as  I  am  discuss¬ 
ing  it  under  the  general  title'  of  the  One  and  the  Many,  is 
but  a  generalization  of  the  same  problem  in  chemistry, 
physics,  biology,  ethics,  philosophy  of  the  state,  and  in  all 
the  other  sciences.  In  religion  our  question  is,  what  is  the 
relation  between  God  and  man?  Is  God  the  all-inclusive 
being  in  whom  literally  we  all  live,  move,  and  have  our 
being?  And  do  we  exist  only  as  parts  of  God?  To  this 
question  Pantheism  replies  in  the  affirmative.  All  finite 
selves  are  only  parts  of  the  single  being.  Pantheism  denies 
that  we  have  separate  or  semi-independent  existence.  The 


394 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


only  being  that  has  reality  is  natura  naturans ,  or  Active 
Nature ,  which  is  God,  as  Spinoza  puts  it.  This  being  the 
case,  all  reality  is  denied  to  natura  naturata,  or  Passive 
Nature.  The  question  emerges,  are  we  separate,  free, 
responsible  beings?  The  answer  of  Spinoza  and  of  all  the 
thoroughgoing  singularists  or  monists  is  1 1  no !  ’ ’  Thus,  the 
same  problem  appears  in  connection  with  the  human  will. 
Have  we  the  power  of  self-determination  ?  Can  we  in  any 
way  freely  determine  the  courses  of  our  actions  and 
volitions  ? 

Moral  self-determination  need  not  mean  caprice.  It 
means,  however,  that  to  some  degree  I  determine  my  own 
destiny,  that  in  some  small  way,  I  am  the  captain  of  my 
own  ship.  However,  if  I  am  to  make  a  good  voyage,  there 
are  certain  conditions  which  I  must  acknowledge  and  obey. 
But  moral  freedom  means  that  these  given  conditions  are 
not  the  whole  of  the  moral  life.  I  am  my  own  steersman. 
Necessitarianism  says  that  man  is  like  a  pawn  on  a  chess¬ 
board,  or  like  a  mote  in  the  sunbeam;  that  his  life  is 
completely  and  inevitably  determined  by  forces  of  which 
he  is  only  the  geometrical  meeting  point.  Here  again 
appears  that  fundamental  contrast  between  the  view  of  the 
Singularist  and  that  of  the  Pluralist.  But  freedom  seems 
to  be  inconsistent  with  absolute  Singularism. 

Let  us  consider  briefly  the  motives  which  lead  from 
Pluralism  to  Singularism.  The  naive  standpoint  is  plural¬ 
istic.  This  standpoint  is  natural  to  man.  To  us  all  the 
world  appears  as  an  aggregate  or  collection  of  many  distinct 
beings.  The  primitive  world  view,  as  we  have  already 
seen,  is  through  and  through  pluralistic.  But  the  develop¬ 
ment  of  thought  and  the  organization  of  society  involve  an 
increasing  recognition  of  order  and  law  in  both  natural 
and  social  phenomena.  The  growth  of  organization  or 
order  in  social  life  tends  always  to  be  reflected  in  our 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM 


395 


interpretation  of  physical  nature.2  At  first  natural  phe¬ 
nomena  appeared  to  be  capricious  and  wholly  independent 
of  any  principle  of  organization.  But  as  social  and  technical 
control  increased,  man  began  to  find  law  and  order  in 
nature.  It  is  at  this  point,  where  man  has  become  conscious 
of  the  existence  of  some  unifying  principle  in  nature,  that 
we  find  the  early  Greek  philosophers.  These  men  are 
singularists.  Thales  and  the  others  felt  that  all  finite 
forms  of  existence  were  modifications  of  the  one  all-inclusive 
substance.  The  wonderful  suggestiveness  of  the  Greek 
movement  resides  in  the  great  diversity  of  types  of  unity 
which  they  suggested.  They  all  agree  in  the  assertion  of 
the  existence  of  unity. 

Religion  has  also  moved  from  Pluralism  to  Singularism. 
In  its  earliest  stages  it  is  generally  a  chaotic  polytheism, 
and  moves  on  until  it  becomes  monotheistic.  The  highest 
form  of  monotheism  is  given  us  in  such  prophets  as  Isaiah. 
Such  expressions  as  the  following  evidence  this:  “I  am 
Jehovah ;  I  form  the  light  and  make  darkness ;  I  make 
peace  and  create  evil;  there  is  none  other  beside  me.” 
Isaiah  is  in  agreement  with  the  early  Greek  philosophers. 
There  is  only  one  ultimate  being. 

Let  us  consider  certain  aspects  in  which  the  universe 
is  one.  Take,  for  instance,  the  perceptual  order.  In  this 
order,  space  is  an  absolute  continuum.  It  is  impossible 
for  us  to  imagine  that  there  is  no  space  between  any  two 
solar  systems,  or  between  any  two  electrons.  We  cannot 
think  that  space  is  bounded.  There  are  no  utmost  limits 
to  space.  Neither  can  we  conceive  space  to  be  so  divided 
that  there  is  no  space  between  the  parts.  Mathematics  has 
at  last  succeeded  in  defining  linear  and  other  continua  in 
such  a  way  as  to  make  perfectly  clear  the  meaning  of  our 


2  The  great  French  movement  in  social  psychology  of  the  last 
generation,  carried  on  by  such  men  as  Levy-Briihl,  Ribot,  Diirk- 
heim  and  others,  has  made  its  contribution  at  this  very  point. 


396 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


inability  so  to  conceive  space.  And,  in  the  modern  mathe¬ 
matical  conception  of  the  nature  of  the  infinite,  we  have 
traveled  a  long  way  from  the  notions  which  regarded  the 
infinite  as  the  merely  unlimited  and  also  have  traveled  far 
from  the  Hamiltonian  conception  of  the  infinite  as  the 
mere  negation  of  the  finite.  Space  is  not  the  only  con¬ 
tinuum.  Time  also  appears  to  be  a  continuum.  We  cannot 
think  of  two  successive  events  between  which  there  is  not 
time.  It  is  quite  true  that  experiential  time  comes  for  us, 
as  James  puts  it,  in  drops,  but  the  reason  for  this  is  the 
rhythmic  character  of  our  attention.  Time  does  not  so 
appear  to  us  when  we  think  time.  We  can  only  think  time 
as  continuous.  In  addition  to  space  and  time,  we  find  a 
causal  principle  of  unity.  The  causal  postulate  means  that 
if  the  same  kinds  of  antecedents  occur,  the  same  kinds  of 
consequents  or  effects  will  follow.  Causation  appears  to 
be  a  form  of  unity  or  order  which  is  as  fundamental  as 
either  space  or  time.  We  hold  that  there  is  a  connection 
between  the  moving  of  the  string  on  yonder  window  curtain 
and  the  planet  Mars.  We  are  told  by  the  physicist  that  the 
fall  of  the  minutest  particle  causes  a  tremor  throughout 
the  solar  system.  Tennyson  has  this  form  of  unity  in  mind 
when  he  says : 

Flower  in  the  crannied  wall, 

I  pluck  you  out  of  the  crannies, 

Hold  you  here,  root  and  all,  in  my  hand. 

Little  flower — but  if  I  could  understand 
What  you  are,  root  and  all,  and  all  in  all, 

I  should  know  what  God  and  man  is. 

So  the  motives  making  for  singularism  are  strong  in  all 
directions — in  science,  art,  politics,  and  religion.  The 
Singularist  position  has  appealed  to  the  speculative  poets. 
Indeed,  this  attitude  is  an  expression  of  the  deepest  motives 
of  philosophical  reflection.  Philosophy  is  just  this  deep 
passion  for  the  vision  of  the  whole.  The  philosopher  is 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM 


397 


convinced  that  this  world  of  onrs  is  not  a  junkshop  world 
or  a  rummage  sale  universe.  In  some  way  or  other  this 
universe  is  really  one  orderly  whole.  Tennyson  expresses 
this  unity  of  the  universe  in  his  poem,  The  Higher  Pan¬ 
theism: 

The  Sun,  the  Moon,  the  Stars,  the  Sea,  the  Hills  and  the  Plains — 
Are  not  these,  0  Soul,  the  vision  of  Him  who  reigns'? 

Is  not  the  Vision  He?  Tho’  He  be  not  that  which  He  seems? 
Dreams  are  true  while  they  last,  and  do  we  not  live  in  dreams? 
Earth,  these  solid  stars,  this  weight  of  body  and  limb, 

Are  they  not  sign  and  symbol  of  thy  division  from  Him? 

Glory  about  thee,  without  thee;  and  thou  fulfillest  thy  doom, 
Making  Him  broken  gleams,  and  a  stifled  splendor  and  gloom. 
Speak  to  Him  thou  for  He  hears,  and  Spirit  with  Spirit  can 
meet — 

Closer  is  He  than  breathing,  and  nearer  than  hands  and  feet. 

Wordsworth  in  his  Lines  composed  a  few  miles  above 
T intern  Abbey  thus  voices  his  sense  of  a  Universal  Presence : 

And  I  have  felt 

A  presence  that  disturbs  me  with  the  joy 
Of  elevated  thoughts :  a  sense  sublime 
Of  something  far  more  deeply  interfused, 

Whose  dwelling  is  the  light  of  setting  suns 
And  the  round  ocean  and  the  living  air, 

And  the  blue  sky,  and  in  the  mind  of  man, 

A  motion  and  a  spirit,  that  impels 

All  thinking  things,  all  objects  of  all  thoughts, 

And  rolls  through  all  things. 

The  doctrine  of  the  universal  soul  or  self,  which  includes 
and  sustains  all  things  finite  and  mortal  as  the  being  of 
their  beings  and  life  of  their  lives ;  the  absolute  and  eternal 
spirit  who  is  the  undying  and  unchanging  reality  behind 
the  illusory  appearances  of  the  many  finite  selves,  is  the 
most  characteristic  teaching  of  the  Ancient  Hindu  religio- 
philosophical  literature — the  Upanishads.  This  doctrine, 


398 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


one  of  the  classical  forms  of  absolute  singularism  or  numer¬ 
ical  monism,  is  beautifully  expressed  in  Emerson’s  little 
poem,  Brahma : 

If  the  red  slayer  thinks  he  slays, 

Or  if  the  slain  think  he  is  slain, 

They  know  not  well  the  subtle  ways 
I  keep,  and  pass,  and  turn  again. 

Far  or  forgot  to  me  is  near; 

Shadow  and  sunlight  are  the  same; 

The  vanish’d  gods  to  me  appear; 

And  one  to  me  are  shame  and  fame. 

They  reckon  ill  who  leave  me  out; 

When  me  they  fly,  I  am  the  wings; 

I  am  the  doubter  and  the  doubt, 

And  I  the  hymn  the  Brahman  sings. 

The  reader  who  will  ponder  well  this  little  gem  will 
find  that  it  contains  the  gist  of  many  pages  of  philosophical 
argumentation  and  explication.  Spinoza’s  ethics  is  an 
elaboration  of  the  same  motif;  Hegel’s  whole  system  is  a 
subtle  and  labored  endeavor  to  apply  and  deepen  the 
meaning  of  the  same  fundamental  intuition  wdiich  consists 
in  “seeing  all  things  in  God”  (the  latter  expression  is 
from  Malebranche,  a  disciple  of  Descartes)  ;  Bradley  and 
Royce  essay,  with  somewhat  different  emphasis,  the  task  of 
establishing  the  truth  of  the  same  insight  in  the  light  of 
modern  logic  and  psychology. 

What  chiefly  distinguishes  our  modern  European  philoso¬ 
pher-pantheists  from  their  congeners  of  ancient  India  is 
the  constant  endeavor  of  the  Europeans  to  find  place  and 
significance  and  value  in  the  Eternal  One  for  the  various 
degrees  of  psychical  and  spiritual  individuality  and  for 
the  labors,  sufferings  and  achievements  of  the  historical 
life  of  humanity.  Among  them  Hegel  has  made  the  bravest 
attempt  of  all;  and  Royce,  with  his  reiterated  emphasis  on 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM 


399 


the  volitional  and  purposive  character  of  reality  and  his 
stressing  of  the  significance,  in  and  for  the  Eternal  Indi¬ 
vidual,  of  the  strivings,  deeds,  and  emotions  of  the  human 
self  and  the  social  order,  finally  developed,  in  his  doctrine 
of  God  as  the  spirit  of  the  beloved  community,  a  standpoint 
which  nearly  succeeds  in  reconciling  the  belief  in  man’s 
distinct  individuality  and  freedom  with  eternalistic  singu- 
larism.  The  course  of  modern  speculation  on  this  theme 
suggests  the  question  whether  the  eternalistic  singularists 
have  not  attempted  an  impossible  task.  Does  not  the  initial 
assumption,  that  the  temporal  order,  the  entire  realm  of 
change,  evolution,  culture  history,  and  individual  develop¬ 
ment,  is  mere  appearance  of  a  timeless  order,  condemn 
philosophy  and  the  reflective  life  to  a  denial  of  the  mean¬ 
ingful  reality  of  experience  and  human  life  and  send 
philosophy  on  a  flight  into  the  inane  from  which,  logically, 
it  has  no  way  of  return  and  no  means  of  finding  a  positive 
valuation  for  human  life  and  experience  ? 

There  are  two  types  of  philosophical  Singularism.  First, 
is  the  Singularism  of  substance,  Spinoza’s  doctrine.  This 
is  the  view  that  there  is  one  all-inclusive  being,  the  absolute 
or  one  substance.  True  human  freedom  depends  on  our 
recognizing  the  illusory  nature  of  our  ordinary  beliefs  as 
to  the  separate  or  independent  existence  of  finite  being. 
True  insight  consists  in  understanding  that  we  are  nothing 
apart  from  God.  Our  true  being  consists  in  our  membership 
in  him.  We  are  in  the  One.  Substance  is  that  which  exists 
in  itself  and  by  itself,  and  the  philosopher  is  the  one  who 
sees  all  things  under  the  form  of  eternity.  And  in  so  far 
as  we  achieve  genuine  freedom,  we  live  under  the  vision  of 
things,  sub  specie  ceternitatis ,  “under  the  form  of  eternity.” 
Bondage  and  error  is  the  lot  of  all  who  are  outside  of  this 
vision.  We  are  all  parts  of  the  one  substance,  but  these 
parts  are  not,  however,  of  the  same  glory.  There  are  degrees 
of  reality  in  finite  beings.  The  second,  or  Hegelian  doctrine, 


400  THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 

is  that  the  absolute  is  the  one  all-inclusive  spirit  or  indi¬ 
vidual. 

II.  The  Spinozistic  Conception  of  the  Absolute 

The  true  or  adequate  view  of  reality,  for  Spinoza,  consists 
in  seeing  all  that  is  finite  and  temporal  as  the  necessary 
expression  of  the  infinite  and  eternal.  This  view  Spinoza 
calls  intuitive  knowledge.  The  essence  of  every  finite  being 
is  the  striving  to  express  its  own  being,  but  the  true  being 
of  man  consists  in  seeing  himself  as  part  of  the  One.  In 
this  way  all  finite  evil  and  good  vanish.  Evil  and  good  are 
functions  of  our  failure  to  consider  things  sub  specie 
ceternitatis.  Immortality  is  not  a  duration  of  our  lives 
through  endless  time ;  the  living  in  it  is  the  vision  of  all 
things  as  seen  in  the  light  of  eternal  truth — of  the  Absolute. 
Passions  and  emotions  belong  to  us  as  finite,  but  the  idea 
of  God  enables  us.  to  detect  and  distinguish  the  higher  from 
the  lower  elements  in  them.  By  this  vision  the  negative 
elements  of  our  experience  are  eliminated  and  this  elimina¬ 
tion  is  necessary  for  the  bringing  about  of  true  and 
adequate  ideas.  True  freedom  consists  intellectually  in 
seeing  ourselves  and  all  things  as  necessary  elements  in 
the  perfection  of  God.  True  freedom  consists  emotionally 
in  what  Spinoza  calls  amor  intellectual  is  dei.  This  intel¬ 
lectual  love  of  God  is  part  of  the  infinite  love  wherewith  God 
loves  himself.  ( Ethics  V,  36.)  The  finite,  human  self, 
with  all  its  positive  individuality  disappears  in  an  abstrac¬ 
tion,  and  in  this  way  Spinoza  reproduces  the  principle  of 
asceticism  while  rejecting  it.  So  far  as  our  life  is  pene¬ 
trated  and  controlled  by  this  insight  of  seeing  all  things 
in  God,  we  have  actually  become  God.  It  is  only  by  means 
of  this  insight  that  man  can  actually  partake  in  God’s 
liberty.  In  so  far  as  man  is  finite,  he  cannot  achieve  the 
liberty  of  God.  In  so  far  as  man  is  finite,  he  is  wholly 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM 


401 


determined  by  antecedents,  and  in  so  far  as  man  is  raised 
to  the  infinite,  his  individuality  seems  to  vanish.  All  finite 
things  as  finite,  are  modes  or  modifications  of  this  one 
infinite  substance.  Finite  being  is  like  a  ripple  on  the 
surface  of  the  ocean  of  being.  This  analogy,  however,  is 
defective  for  the  reason  that  the  finite  self  can  become  a 
conscious  part  of  God. 

How  does  Spinoza  reach  this  conception  of  the  One,  the 
absolute  substance,  God?  He  starts  out  as  a  rationalistic 

mvstie  in  a  wav  that  reminds  us  of  the  Stoic  and  of  the 

%/  * 

Neoplatonist.  He  really  sets  out  from  an  intuition.  A 
pantheist  is  one  who  identifies  God  and  the  world.  Now 
there  are  two  types  of  pantheists.  Spinoza  is  not  a  crude 
pantheist,  that  is,  he  does  not  regard  God  as  the  soul  of 
the  world.  God  is  for  Spinoza,  not  the  soul  of  the  world, 
but  the  only  being  that  really  is.  God  is  the  all-in-all,  the 
all-one.  Everything  depends  upon  him  and  is  determined 
necessarily  so  to  follow  from  the  divine  nature.  Things 
as  such  have  no  existence.  The  world  of  finite  selves  and 
other  beings,  for  Spinoza,  has  no  existence  on  its  own 
account.  It  is  only  a  manifestation  of  God  seen  from  a 
finite  point  of  view.  God  is  the  only  reality.  God  is  the 
one  substance.  Spinoza  may  well  be  called  an  acosmist 
or  an  acosmic  pantheist,  in  that  he  denies  to  the  world 
any  independent  reality  except  as  a  manifestation  of  God 
to  the  finite.  It  is  no  wonder  that  Novalis  referred  to  him 
as  the  God-intoxicated  man. 

In  contrast  with  his  view,  pancosmic  pantheism  regards 
God  as  nothing  more  than  the  all-pervading  spirit  of 
nature.  For  Spinoza,  nature  is  taken  up  into  God ;  for 
pancosmism,  God  is  absorbed  in  nature. 

In  his  method  Spinoza  is  deductive  and  geometrical.  He 
starts  out,  not  with  concrete  fact,  but  with  his  a  priori 
definition  of  substance.  The  definition  which  he  gives  of 
substance  is  somewhat  as  follows:  “That  which  exists 


402 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


in  itself  and  is  conceived  through  itself ;  that  is,  which,  in 
order  to  be  conceived,  does  not  need  a  prior  conception 
of  anything  else.  ’  ’  In  other  words,  for  Spinoza,  substance 
is  the  self-existent  being,  and  in  this  way  the  universe  is 
truly  one.  There  is  nothing  outside  of  God  to  either  hinder 
or  influence  him.  The  human  mind  is  a  mode  of  the  mind 
of  God  and  the  human  body  is  a  modification  of  his  at¬ 
tribute  of  extension.  All  things  exist  in,  and  all  events 
follow  from,  the  divine  nature  by  a  necessity  which  is  the 
same  as  the  necessity  which  gives  rise  to  the  theorems  of 
geometry.  God  is  the  universal,  mathematical  ground  of 
all  things.  Nothing  exists  without  him.  All  depends  on 
and  follows  from  his  nature.  Man  is  not  free,  save  as  he 
rises  to  this  insight  that  he  is  a  true  part  of  the  infinite 
substance.  God  is  the  necessary  or  absolute  all-inclusive 
timeless  cause  and  there  is  no  cause  aside  from  his  perfect 
nature.  God  is  the  real  being  of  nature — natura  naturans 
— he  is  the  active  nature.  God  is  the  ceaselessly  active 
ground  of  all  events  in  the  world ;  he  is  not  a  cosmical  soul 
in  the  world — the  world  is  in  him.  He  alone  is  the  eternal 
cause  of  the  whole  procession  of  nature. 

God  expresses  himself  to  us  in  two  parallel  ways ;  to 
wit,  thought  and  extension.  Of  thought  we  say  that  it  is 
both  intellect  and  will,  but  we  must  not  attribute  these 
to  God  as  we  do  to  ourselves.  Our  intellect  is  dependent 
on  sensory  stimuli  for  the  materials  of  thought;  our  in¬ 
tellect  works  episodically  and  inaccurately,  but  God  grasps 
all  things  in  one  timeless  pulse  of  thought. 

One  conception  made  famous  by  Spinoza’s  extreme 
formulation  of  it  is  the  meaning  of  definition.  Omnis 
determinatio  est  negatio,  that  is,  all  definition  is  limita¬ 
tion  or  negation.  To  define  anything  is  to  deny  the  con¬ 
tradictory  of  the  qualities  involved  in  the  definition  and 
thus  to  limit  the  object  defined.  God  is  above  all  definition, 
and  in  this  Spinoza  agrees  with  the  Neoplatonists  and  with 


SINGULAR! SM  AND  PLURALISM 


403 


the  speculative  mystics  of  the  type  of  Bruno  and  Meister 
Eckhart.  No  positive  statements  can  be  made  as  to  the 
nature  of  God  or  the  One.  Logically  one  can  only  say 
that  He  is  not-finite,  not-in-space,  not-in-time,  et  cetera. 

Spinoza  really  has  two  inconsistent  views  of  the  nature 
of  substance.  In  the  first  place,  substance  is  conceived  as 
an  indeterminate  absolute  without  any  definite  nature, 
and  secondly,  he  means  by  the  absolute  the  totality  of 
thing's  regarded  as  a  unity.  Spinoza  does  not  attempt  to 
prove  that  there  is  only  one  substance.  This  is  for  him  a 
rational  intuition,  the  self-existent  totality  of  being.  All 
that  is,  is.  But  has  he  the  right  to  further  assume  that 
all  that  is,  is  a  single  being  or  unity  ?  It  is  3  true  that 
Spinoza  attempts  to  deduce  the  many  from  the  one ;  but 
the  nature  of  the  latter  is  assumed  to  be  self-evident  and, 
therefore,  the  doctrine  that  the  many  are  but  transitory  and 
broken  glimpses  of  the  eternal  and  self -complete  One  is 
taken  to  be  equally  self-evident. 

III.  The  Hegelian  Conception  of  the  Absolute 

At  bottom  Hegel’s  point  of  view  is  that  the  Absolute 
is  the  all-inclusive  unity  of  the  Cosmical  Spirit  or  Mind, 
and  it  is  this  point  of  view  which  he  has  so  elaborately 
worked  out  as  to  make  him  the  father  of  a  distinctive 
school.  His  position  is  called  absolute  idealism.  For 
Hegel  the  absolute  or  the  all-inclusive  unity  is  mind,  spirit, 
Geist.  For  Bradley,  the  absolute  is  experience.  For 
Royce,  it  is  an  absolute  self  or  individual,  the  eternal 
knower  and  fulfiller  of  all  finite  purposes  and  meanings. 

Hegel  starts  from  the  position  that  nothing  can  be  real 
apart  from  consciousness  or  experience.  We  know  noth¬ 
ing  about  anything  apart  from  experience.  Reality  is 

3  I  am  indebted  to  E.  Caird’s  article  on  Cartesianism  in  the 
Encyclopaedia  Britannica,  11th  ed. 


404 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


that  which  is  present  in  experience.  At  this  point  Hegel 
shows,  by  his  famous  dialectic  or  argumentation,  that  all 
finite  being  is  related  or  dependent.  We  cannot  say  any¬ 
thing  about  anything  except  by  reference  to  something 
other  than  what  we  talk  of.  Thought  is  a  process  of 
othering.4  Likeness,  for  instance,  has  no  meaning  apart 
from  difference.  Even  a  single  object  such  as  an  orange 
is  a  relational  whole  of  different  or  opposed  qualities — 
for  round  is  not  sweet,  yellow  is  not  round,  and  juicy  is 
not  yellow,  and  so  on.  Cause  and  effect  have  no  meaning 
apart  from  one  another.  Change  and  permanence,  essence 
and  accident,  substance  and  attribute,  force  and  its  ex¬ 
pression,  imply  one  another.  So  too  in  the  vital  and  human 
world.  Life  and  death  go  together,  humility  and  pride, 
the  individual  and  the  family,  the  family  and  the  larger 
community  of  city  and  state,  go  together.  The  individual 
lives  in  and  through  the  species,  the  species  lives  in  and 
through  the  whole  of  living  existence.  Life  and  its 
physical  environment  imply  one  another.  Inorganic  and 
organic,  mind  and  body,  self  and  society,  finite  and  in¬ 
finite,  God  and  the  world,  are  interrelated  in  the  whole, 
which  is  an  organic  system.  Everything  finite  is  related 
to  something  other  than  itself,  and  it  is  the  unity  of  its 
opposite  qualities.^  Anything  can  be  the  ‘‘same,”  that  is, 
be  itself  only  by  reference  to  an  ‘  ‘  other,  ’  ’  that  is,  not-itself . 
We  can  think  of  nothing  that  does  not  imply  relations. 

Kant  had  tried  to  solve  this  problem  by  saying  that  we 
know  only  appearances  or  phenomena.  In  our  knowledge 
there  are  two  factors — forms  and  sensation.  Forms  are 
the  organizing  or  relating  activities  of  the  mind ;  sensa¬ 
tions  are  the  unorganized  content  which  come  to  us  from 
we  know  not  where,  and  it  is  because  of  this  dualism 
between  the  forms  of  thought  and  sensation  that  knowledge 


4  Bradley,  Royce,  and  the  Pragmatists  share  this  view  of  thought. 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM 


405 


for  Kant  is  transcendentally  ideal,  while  it  is  valid  only 
empirically.  We  can  have  no  knowledge  of  things-in- 
themselves. 

Hegel’s  view  is  that  a  thing  is  what  it  appears  to  be. 
He  holds  that  the  Kantian  distinction  of  phenomena  and 
noumena  is  illogical.  For  Hegel  everything  is  related. 
Reality  for  him  is  the  systematic  whole  of  interrelated 
qualities.  It  is  not  something  remote  or  beyond  our 
world.  God  is  not  something  behind  the  stars.  He  is 
what  he  appears  as  being.  Of  Herbert  Spencer’s  concep¬ 
tion  of  God  as  infinite  and  eternal  energy,  Hegel  would 
doubtless  say,  he  does  not  go  far  enough.  God  is  all 
that  Spencer  says,  but  he  is  also  much  more.  God  is 
thought  and  will  organizing  a  spiritual  world,  as  well 
as  energy  and  life.  Reality  is  to  be  interpreted  in  terms 
of  experience.  The  completest  manifestation  of  God  is 
to  be  had  in  human  life.  This  unity  must  also  exist  for 
itself,  fur  sich,  that  is,  it  must  be  conscious,  it  must 
be  spirit.  Things  are  related.  They  constitute  a  unity, 
and  they  exist  only  for  a  self.  Our  experience  is  only  a 
fragment.  Our  selfhood  is  finite.  God  is  the  absolute 
mind  for  whom  the  whole  organized  system  of  things 
exists. 

The  process  of  the  world  is  the  ever  increasing  manifesta¬ 
tion  and  realization  of  absolute  mind.  In  no  finite  mind 
does  the  thought  of  unity  constitute  the  unity  of  the  world, 
since  the  unity  of  the  world  is  present  to  no  finite  mind. 
Therefore  God  is  the  absolute  thought  or  mind,  the  ab¬ 
solute  individual,  and  the  measure  of  reality  is  indi¬ 
viduality.  The  more  any  being  is  an  organized  totality,  a 
coherent  system  of  internal  relations,  the  more  individuality 
and  reality  it  has.  God  is  the  absolute  totality  of  relations. 

The  real  is  a  living  process,  purposive  and  rational,  an 
organized  rational  unity  or  spiritual  system  which  is  the 
absolute  mind — God — in  nature  and  in  humanity,  but 


406 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


realizing  himself  most  fully  in  the  spiritual  life  of  the 
highest  civilized  humanity,  through  the  forms  of  social 
organization,  art,  religion,  and  philosophy,  in  which  God 
comes  to  the  fullest  consciousness  of  himself  that  is  pos¬ 
sible  through  finite  beings.  Thus  reality  is  a  spiritual 
process  that  ceaselessly  realizes  itself  in  the  successive  steps 
from  unconscious  nature  to  the  most  fully  organized  ra¬ 
tional  mind  as  achieved  in  civilized  society — in  civic  com¬ 
munity,  the  state,  the  work  of  art,  the  church,  and,  at  the 
very  summit,  in  philosophy’s  understanding  of  the  whole 
process  as  the  self -revelation  and  self-fulfillment  of  abso¬ 
lute  mind.  The  Absolute  is  a  spiritual  system,  a  whole 
of  interrelated,  living,  thinking,  willing  beings  which  exist 
as  a  whole  in  and  for  God — the  unitary  spirit  of  the  whole. 
God  is  a  spirit  living  in  his  own  concrete  differences,  men 
and  things.  Mind  is  the  true  whole,  but  not  any  finite 
individual  mind  or  system  of  minds,  since  these  never  con¬ 
stitute  a  perfect,  self-sustaining,  self-existing  unity.  The 
absolute  mind — God — of  which  all  finite  minds  and  societies 
are  parts,  is  the  ultimate  and  true  reality.  All  stages  and 
forms  of  organization  and  all  the  works  of  culture — all 
organized  social  life,  all  art  forms,  all  religion,  and  all 
science,  are  stages  in  the  increasing  apprehension  and 
comprehension  by  the  finite  mind  of  the  absolute  mind, 
in  and  through  which  progressive  apprehensions  and  com¬ 
prehensions  the  absolute  individual  or  cosmic  mind  comes 
to  fuller  self-expression  in  the  temporal  order.  Of  the 
whole  unceasing  process  by  which  “the  thoughts  of  men 
are  widened  with  the  process  of  the  suns,”  God  is  the 
eternal  ground. 

The  following  are  the  chief  points  of  contrast  between 
the  various  leading  forms  of  recent  singularistic  idealism 
or  spiritualism.  Whereas  Spinoza’s  absolute  substance 
is  statically  conceived  and  only  by  a  pretty  thoroughgoing 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM 


407 


inconsistency  can  be  admitted  to  include  individuality  and 
purposiveness,  Hegel’s  Absolute  is  conceived  to  be  a  dy¬ 
namic  and  purposive  totality  of  process,  in  which  the 
various  degrees  of  finite  organization  or  systematic  and 
rational  wholeness  embody  the  absolute  precisely  in  the 
respective  degrees  to  which  they  are  organized  wholes. 
Inorganic  and  organic  nature,  the  minds  of  individuals, 
the  objective  mind,  embodied  in  the  organized  social 
institutions  of  family,  civil  society  and  the  political  state, 
and  absolute  mind,  which  comes  to  more  adequate  con¬ 
scious  self-realization  in  the  products  of  human  art  and 
in  religious  ideas  and  acts  and  which  finally  attains  full 
consciousness  of  itself  in  philosophy — all  these  factors  of 
the  actual  world  are,  in  the  order  given,  stages  of  increasing 
meaning  and  content  in  the  ceaseless  self-realization  and 
self -incarnation  of  the  absolute  spirit  or  individual.5 

Bradley  explicitly  denies  that  the  absolute  can  be  a  self. 
It  is  an  utterly  harmonious  experience  and,  therefore,  it 
must  be  beyond  the  distinctions  of  self  and  other.  It  can 
have  no  objects  beyond  itself  to  know,  no  objectives  for 
its  will  and  hence  no  will  or  purpose.  It  includes  truth, 
goodness,  and  beauty,  but,  in  its  ineffable  perfection  and 
harmony,  it  is  beyond  our  human  notions  of  goodness  and 
truth,  since  for  us  these  terms  have  meaning  only  through 
contrast  with  their  opposites.  What  an  experience  can 
mean  which  no  self  owns  or  enjoys  Bradley  fails  to  ex¬ 
plain. 

Royce  explicitly  holds  the  absolute  to  be  the  self  of 
selves  and  the  eternal  fulfillment  of  all  purposes  and 
meanings. 

W.  E.  Hocking  has  developed  a  view  somewhat  like 

Rovce ’s. 

«/ 

5  My  own  interpretation  of  Hegel  is  that  he  conceived  God  to 
be  the  superpersonal  ground  of  the  community  of  selves. 


408 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


IY.  Further  Implications  of  Singularism 

The  singularist  argues  that  there  is  an  analogy  between 
the  relation  of  the  various  subsystems  of  ideas  in  a  human 
mind  to  that  mind  as  a  whole,  and  the  relation  of  all  finite 
minds  as  constituting  the  system  of  the  absolute  mind  to 
the  absolute,  that  is,  the  human  mind  is  the  organization 
of  a  given  body  of  subsystems  of  ideas,  while  the  absolute 
mind  is  the  organization  of  all  the  minds  as  such.  From 
one  point  of  view  reality  may  be  conceived  of  as  only  the 
one  all-inclusive  mind.  The  world  is  an  absolute  in  which 
there  are  already  cures  for  every  disease  and  the  solution 
of  all  problems. 

The  analogy  between  the  structure  of  mind  in  man  and  in 
the  Absolute  has  been  carefully  worked  out  by  Bosanquet. 

Spinoza  at  times  appears  to  regard  the  notion  of  reality 
as  this  static  unity,  but  yet  he  has  to  find  a  place  for  change 
and  all  the  mutations  of  the  temporal  in  his  absolute.  This 
problem  is  a  difficult  one  for  any  person  who  takes  such 
a  point  of  view,  and  it  is  interesting  to  see  how  Spinoza 
meets  the  problem.  In  the  first  twenty-seven  propositions 
of  his  Ethics,  he  discusses  this  bare  abstract  unity,  and 
he  then  makes  the  suggestion  that  we  now  talk  as  the 
common  man  does  and  thus  he  begins  to  talk  of  finite 
things.  This  is  the  arbitrary  way  in  which  he,  and  not 
he  alone,  makes  the  transition  from  the  infinite  to  the 
finite,  from  the  eternal  to  the  temporal.  It  is  very  diffi¬ 
cult  for  one  both  to  eat  his  cake  and  keep  it.  So  it  is 
difficult  to  keep  this  abstract  unity,  and  also  to  conserve 
change.  To  recognize  that  there  is  any  meaning  or  any 
significance  in  this  world  of  time  and  change,  is  to  put 
a  severe  strain  upon  the  timeless  unity.  Our  lives  and  those 
of  others  are  involved  in  time.  Life  is  a  process  of  getting 
up,  getting  dressed,  getting  to  wTork,  getting  something  to 
eat,  getting  to  sleep — in  short,  it  is  one  thing  after  another. 


SINGULARI SM  AND  PLURALISM 


409 


But  the  absolute  is  an  all-inclusive,  unchanging  principle. 
But  what  is  the  relation  of  these  two  to  each  other  ? 

In  Hegel’s  system  the  chief  weight  falls  upon  the  evolu¬ 
tionary  or  process  conception  of  reality.  The  universe  is  a 
dynamic  and  developing  order.  Hegel  sometimes  speaks  as 
if  God,  or  the  absolute  idea,  were  the  subject  of  develop¬ 
ment,  as  if  the  dialectic  evolution  of  the  universe  were  the 
evolution  of  God  himself.  And,  in  one  sense,  this  must  be 
so  in  such  a  system.  By  far  the  greater  part  of  Hegel’s 
work  consisted  in  tracing  the  stages  in  the  evolution  of 
reality.  On  the  other  hand,  Hegel  seems  to  hold  that  the 
entire  process  of  cosmical  evolution  is  the  logical  or  neces¬ 
sary  unfolding  of  an  eternal  order.  From  the  latter  point 
of  view,  all  change  and  development  must  be  internal  to 
the  absolute  idea.  Change  takes  place  in  it ;  it  does  not 
change,  as  such,  but  it  eternally  fulfills  itself  through 
change.  All  the  biographies  of  individuals  and  all  the 
histories  of  living  forms  and  of  worlds  are  necessary  ex¬ 
pressions  of  the  timeless  order  of  the  whole.  (Cf.  Ch. 
XXVIII.)  Thus  the  whole  content  of  the  temporal  world 
is  the  ceaseless  process  of  self-manifestation  on  the  part 
of  the  timeless  absolute.  How  a  timeless  order  can  realize 
itself  in  time,  without  either  ceasing  to  be  timeless  or  de¬ 
priving  the  changes  and  acts  of  the  realm  of  time  of  any 
real  meaning,  neither  Hegel  nor  any  of  his  disciples  has 
ever  made  clear.  Certainly  an  energizing  life  or  will,  or 
even  a  total  experience,  which  neither  experiences  nor 
initiates  change  seems  an  unmeaning  conception.  A  time¬ 
less  consciousness  or  self  is  a  senseless  monster.  If  there 
be  a  single  life  or  will  that  pulsates  through  the  whole  uni¬ 
verse  it  must  do  deeds  and  suffer  changes  in  time. 

Royce  is  emphatic  in  his  insistence  on  the  significance 
of  the  temporal.  He  calls  his  position  absolute  pragmatism. 
God  is  the  complete  fulfillment  of  all  the  meanings  of  our 


410 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


ideas.  Ideas  are  plans  of  action.  They  are  not  reports 
of  the  structure  of  things.  Ideas  are  not  cognitive  func¬ 
tions  so  much  as  practical  guides.  An  idea  has  always 
an  aim,  it  is  purposive,  it  is  something  which  requires 
its  own  fulfillment.  The  absolute  is  the  final  fulfillment 
of  all  our  ideas.  The  absolute  is  the  inclusive  will  or 
purpose.  For  the  absolute  monistic  idealist,  our  temporal 
experiences  are  elements  in  an  unchanging  whole,  and 
our  errors,  sins,  and  failures,  are  transmuted  into  the 
perfection  of  the  absolute.  All  of  our  sufferings  and  im¬ 
perfections  contribute  to  the  harmoniousness  of  the  whole. 
The  whole  is  a  perfectly  harmonious  and  blissful  unity.  In 
the  whole  the  good  is  eternally  achieved. 

Let  us  sajr  a  few  words  of  the  moral  and  religious  im¬ 
plications  of  this  theory.  These  implications  are  opti¬ 
mistic,  deterministic,  quietistic,  and  mystical.  Singularism 
is  essentially  deterministic.  The  only  freedom  for  the  in¬ 
dividual  consists  simply  in  a  clear-sighted  recognition  by 
the  individual  of  the  fact  that  he,  like  all  else,  is  a  neces¬ 
sary  element  in  this  perfect  whole  and  that  his  whole 
function  is  submission  to  this  absolute.  Job  expressed 
this  attitude  when  he  said:  “Though  he  slay  me,  yet  will 
I  trust  in  him.”  Every  deed,  every  fate  of  each  finite 
being,  is  as  it  should  be  and  it  could  not  be  otherwise. 
The  lout,  the  imbecile,  the  fool,  the  debauchee,  the  saint, 
yes,  and  even  the  wise  man — all  have  their  lives  as  de¬ 
termined  elements  in  the  absolute  whole.  The  only  free¬ 
dom  is  the  willing  recognition  of  the  dependence  of  all 
things  as  parts  of  the  absolute.  The  second  attitude  or 
rather,  implication,  of  this  viewpoint  is  that  all  is  well 
with  the  world,  God  is  on  his  throne,  let  no  man  worry. 
This  is  the  optimistic  implication  of  Singularism. 

God's  in  His  Heaven, 

All's  right  with  the  world. 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM 


411 


In  connection  with  this  implication  we  have  the  fact 
that  the  goal  of  absolutism  is,  from  the  religious  point  of 
view,  quietistic  in  much  the  same  way  as  is  that  of  Neo¬ 
platonism.  With  singularism  of  all  forms  there  goes  a 
certain  type  of  mysticism.  There  is  the  unio  mystica,  an 
experience  in  which  we  feel  the  consummation  of  our 
being  and  this  consummation  expresses  itself  emotionally 
in  what  Spinoza  called  the  intellectual  love  of  God.  The 
ultimate  good  to  the  wise  is  the  insight  that  all  finite 
beings  have  their  true  measure  of  being  in  the  infinite. 
This  quietistic  attitude  received  its  classical  formulation 
in  the  Leibnitzian  hypothesis — in  the  statement  that  this 
world  is  the  best  of  all  possible  worlds.  For  the  most 
adequate  caricature  of  this  position  read  Voltaire’s 
Candide. 


V.  Criticism  of  Singularism 

1.  Some  singularists,  for  example,  Calkins  and  Royce, 
speak  of  the  absolute  as  a  self,  as  a  person.  Miss  Calkins 
calls  the  doctrine  of  Royce  and  herself,  “monistic  personal 
idealism.”  She  interprets  Hegel  as  holding  the  same  doc¬ 
trine.  The  Singularist  talks  about  the  thought  and  will  of 
the  absolute.  Our  conception  of  a  self  is  always  of  a  being 
who  is  a  self  in  relation  to  other  selves.  Genetic  psychology 
affords  us  abundant  ground  for  this.  The  materials  out  of 
which  the  notion  of  selfhood  is  formed  are  the  original  data 
of  our  personalities,  yet  selfhood  develops  only  in  social  rela¬ 
tions.  If  there  is  no  other  being  distinct  from  the  ab¬ 
solute,  then  how  can  the  absolute  be  a  self  ?  Fichte 
expresses  this  social  dialectic  in  these  words:  kein  Mensch 
ohne  Menschen  (“No  man  without  men”).  Bradley  says 
that  the  absolute  is  an  absolute  experience.  Hegel  calls 
it  Geist,  spirit,  or  absolute  idea,  and  in  this  I  believe  they 
were  more  consistent  than  Royce.  We  have  no  justifica- 


412 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


tion  for  calling  the  absolute  a  self,  unless  it  lives  in  social 
interaction  with  other  selves.  In  Royce’s  later  view  the 
absolute  is  the  spirit  of  the  perfected  society — the  beloved 
community . 

As  to  the  Bradleyan  conception,  I  can  here  only  say  that 
I  know  nothing  of  experience  unless  it  be  experience  by 
a  self.  Experience,  that  is,  absolute  experience  in  the 
Bradleyan  sense,  is  a  mere  psychological  abstraction. 
These  men  also  say  that  the  absolute  is  timelessly  perfect, 
and  that  as  a  unity  it  is  beyond  both  time  and  change. 
How  can  there  be  purpose  in  such  a  unity?  Purpose  is 
an  aim,  a  goal,  that  is  postulated,  and  if  there  is  really 
no  change  and  no  time,  then  there  is  no  such  thing  as 
cosmical  purpose.  Bradley  agrees  with  this  and  says 
that,  from  the  point  of  view  of  a  timeless  absolute,  there 
is  no  place  for  development,  no  progress  or  evolution  in 
the  sum  of  things;  these  are  mere  illusions.  For  the 
absolute  there  is  no  change.  The  absolute  may  contain 
histories  without  number,  but  it  can  have  no  history. 
Therefore  all  the  changes  and  histories  which  are  included 
in  the  absolute  must,  in  sum,  cancel  one  another  as  factors 
in  the  harmonious  equipoise  of  the  timelessly  perfect  ex¬ 
perience. 

2.  I  think  that  I  exist  as  a  fragment,  as  a  unique  being, 
and  I  think  of  you  as  existing  likewise.  You  feel  things 
and  no  one  else  feels  your  feelings  as  you  feel  them.  Each 
believes  himself  to  be  an  individual  self.  What  kind  of 
existence  can  you  and  I  have  from  the  point  of  view  of 
the  absolute?  My  existence,  as  I  feel  it,  is  illusory,  erron¬ 
eous,  from  the  absolute’s  point  of  view.  How  does  the 
absolute  know  me  as  a  minute  constituent  in  its  constitu¬ 
tion?  This  is  surely  a  very  different  type  of  experience 
from  the  way  in  which  I  know  myself.  If  the  absolute 
is  really  the  absolute  knower,  I  must  exist  only  as  the  ab¬ 
solute  knows  me  and  then  I  do  not  exist  as  I  know  myself. 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM  413 

This  is  one  way  of  showing  the  inadequacy  of  finite  knowl¬ 
edge.  It  seems  to  cut  the  very  ground  from  under  us. 

3.  We  have  already  seen  that  there  is  no  freedom  on 
the  part  of  the  human  self,  save  as  an  absolutely  deter¬ 
mined  part  of  the  whole.  Practically,  this  is  a  useless  con¬ 
ception.  It  cannot  be  made  applicable  in  courts  or  in  any 
of  our  social  institutions.  Indeed  social  practice  would  be 
impossible  if  this  assumption  were  true.  As  a  working 
point  of  view,  we  must  assume  individual  freedom,  and 
we  have  already  found  that  in  the  long  run  the  demand  is 
honored  by  the  race.  Singularism,  therefore,  does  not 
seem  to  agree  with  our  practical  consciousness  of  freedom 
and  responsibility. 

4.  All  sin,  vice,  suffering,  and  other  evils,  are  viewed 
by  Singularism  as  being  contributory  to  the  universe  as 
a  whole.  Sin  is  sin  only  from  the  finite  point  of  view, 
but,  if  viewed  under  the  form  of  eternity,  it  is  seen  to  be 
contributory  to  the  perfection  of  the  whole.  All  is  right 
in  this  world,  all  is  for  the  best,  let  us  therefore  find,  in 
all  life’s  ups  and  downs,  a  blissful  contemplation  of  the 
absolute. 


VI.  Pluralism 

In  its  extremest  form,  logical  atomism,  this  is  the  doctrine 
that  there  are  many  separate  and  mutually  independent 
beings  which,  taken  in  the  aggregate,  make  up  the  world. 
Pluralism  denies  that  the  world  is  a  complete  unity,  sys¬ 
tematic  whole,  or  order.  In  strict  logic,  the  pluralist  must 
deny  that  there  is  a  universe  at  all.  Our  so-called  universe 
is  a  multiverse.  It  is  a  collection,  consisting  of  an  indefinite 
number,  or  at  least  a  very  great  though  definite  number,  of 
entities  or  beings  having  all  sorts,  as  well  as  no  sorts,  of  rela¬ 
tions  to  one  another.  Indeed,  from  the  standpoint  of  radical 
pluralism,  the  world  is  only  a  collection  for  and  in  the  mind 
of  the  collector.  In  itself  it  is  more  or  less  a  heap,  which  the 


414 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


‘‘high  brow”  collectors,  called  scientists  and  philosophers, 
are  constantly  trying  to  sort  out  and  classify  into  some 
sort  of  order  like  a  museum  or  a  library.  It  serves  the 
economy  of  thought  to  have  one  subject  for  many  predi¬ 
cates.  “World,”  “universe”  or  “cosmos”  is  the  most 
economical  subject  of  thought,  but  it  is  only  a  grammatical, 
not  a  real,  subject.  Since  its  various  predicates  may  have 
no  relations  to  one  another,  they  do  not  really  make  up  one 
world,  and  the  assumption  that  they  do  is  due  to  sub¬ 
stituting  a  mere  grammatical  subject  for  the  aggregate 
of  predicates.  We  may  say,  for  instance,  that  the  “world” 
consists  of  minds,  universals,  or  laws,  physical  and  logical, 
physical  things,  et  cetera.  But,  in  reality,  the  world  con¬ 
sists  of  nothing.  We  ought  rather  to  say  that  there  are 
minds,  universals,  physical  things.  Thus,  the  universe, 
as  a  subject  of  discourse  and  reasoning  is  a  mere  abstract 
term  that  stands  for  nothing  real.  The  atomistic  pluralist  is 
a  thoroughgoing  nominalist,  when  he  is  consistent.  He  has 
considerable  difficulty  in  explaining  why  and  how  men  come 
to  talk  and  think  of  a  universe  at  all.'5 

From  the  pluralistic  standpoint  entities  (a  convenient 
term  to  cover  everything  which  exists,  including  true 
propositions  which  are  said  to  subsist,  whereas  particular 
things  exist)  may  or  may  not  be  interdependent.  There 
are  all  sorts  of  orders  and  disorders  in  our  miscalled  “uni- 


6  Among  the  great  philosophers  of  history  I  have  not  been  able 
to  find  a  simon  pure  pluralist.  Perhaps  David  Hume  is  the  near¬ 
est  approach  to  one;  but  even  he  thought  that  the  world  gave  the 
impression  of  being  constituted  and  ordered  by  a  designing  in¬ 
telligence.  Atomistic  materialism  is  the  most  consistent  form  of 
pluralism;  but  even  here  space,  the  void  in  which  the  atoms  move, 
is  a  continuum.  The  new  realists  of  to-day  are  the  most  vigorous 
of  pluralists;  but  even  Bertrand  Russell,  though  he  calls  his 
philosophy  logical  atomism,  speaks  of  union  with  the  universe 
as  being  the  goal  of  philosophy,  and  he  finds  his  pluriverse  or 
atomistic  collection  of  minds,  universals,  and  sense  data  to  be  the 
product  of  the  blind  forces  of  matter.  This  is  surely  a  unitary 
conception. 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM 


415 


verse.”  Some  entities  are  in  some  relations,  and  some 
are  in  no  relations,  except  the  relation  of  being  in  no 
relation.  There  are  all  sorts,  and  grades,  of  connection. 
Same,  different,  like,  unlike,  on,  under,  above,  below,  equal, 
greater,  less,  before,  after,  simultaneous,  part,  whole,  in, 
outside,  with,  and,  if,  but,  never,  always  (the  reader  can 
continue  the  enumeration  for  himself )— these  terms  ex¬ 
press  familiar  relations.  For  example,  a  color  and  a 
typewriter  are  “on”  the  table  in  different  senses.  The 
color  red  and  the  virtue  of  temperance  seem  to  be  in  no 
relation.  The  pluralist  then  admits  some  order  and  some 
chaos. 

The  neorealistic  pluralist  of  to-day  holds  that  many  of 
the  kinds  of  things  and  relations  in  the  world  might  be 
absent,  without  the  natures  of  the  others  being  changed 
thereby.  In  particular,  mind  and  its  relation  to  other 
entities  are  such  that  they  might  be  taken  out  and  put 
back  into  the  world  without  making  any  difference  to 
the  natures  of  many  other  things.  Imagine,  on  the  table, 
a  heap  consisting  of  marbles,  apples,  shoes,  and  onions. 
Nowt  add  a  mind  perceiving  the  heap.  The  apples  and 
onions  may  be  removed  without  affecting  the  nature  of 
the  shoes  or  marbles.  The  mind  may  be  removed  without 
affecting  the  natures  of  any  of  them,  just  as  its  presence 
made  no  change  in  them.  But  is  this  true?  Would  not 
finer  perception  detect,  perhaps,  a  subtle  change  in  onion, 
apple,  marble,  and  shoes,  due  to  their  compresence?  Cer¬ 
tainly  the  mind  is  affected  by  their  compresence.  May 
it  not,  in  turn,  affect  them?  The  strength  of  the  realist’s 
argument  here  seems  to  depend  on  the  assumption  that 
the  mind  is  a  mere  colorless  and  inert  knower.  Against 
this  the  objective  idealist  argues  that  mind  is  a  name  for 
the  active  awareness  of  the  characters  and  relations  of 
the  things  which  make  up  the  world.  If  one  suppose  all 
mind  abstracted  from  the  world  one  could  not  then  say 


416 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


what  the  remainder  would  be  like,  or  even  what  it  would 
not  be  like.  Even  the  heap  on  the  table  is  a  rudimentary 
kind  of  whole  for  a  mind.  Whenever  we  think  through 
the  fact  that  this  is  a  world,  even  in  the  sense  of  being 
a  collection  of  different  kinds  of  entities,  we  seem  com¬ 
pelled  to  admit  that  it  has  a  structure  or  texture  which  is 
nearest  of  kin  to  the  organized  texture  of  mind.  For,  the 
better  the  world  becomes  known,  the  more  fully  it  reveals 
itself  as  an  intelligible  system  or  order  of  related  qualities 
and  powers,  and  as  sustaining  and  expressing  the  kind  of 
organization  which  mind  builds  up  and,  in  building  up, 
realizes  its  own  nature. 

Personal istic  Pluralism  is  one  of  the  vigorous  and  influen¬ 
tial  movements  in  Anglo-American  philosophy  to-day.  It 
is  not  a  radical  pluralism,  since  it  almost  invariably  argues 
for  the  existence  of  God  as  the  Supreme  Person  or  Spirit 
who  is  the  ground  and  goal  of  the  lives  of  finite  persons  or 
spirits.  Hence  the  whole  standpoint  may  be  called  a  plural¬ 
istic  theism.  The  advocates  of  this  type  of  pluralism  who 
also  deny  the  existence  of  material  entities  are  called  per¬ 
sonal  idealists  or  mental ists  or  panpsychists.  The  latter 
doctrine,  of  course,  harks  back  to  Leibnitz.  The  selves  or 
spirits,  which  alone  exist,  are  like  his  monads,  except  that 
all  personal  idealists  to-day  admit  their  interaction.  Thus, 
personal  idealism  stands  in  contrast,  both  to  a  materialistic 
atomism  or  pluralism  and  to  a  dualistic  pluralism.  From 
the  last  standpoint  there  exist  a  plurality  of  entities  of  two 
kinds — material  and  spiritual. 

Personalistic  pluralists  deny  the  singularistic  contention 
that  finite  persons  exist  only  as  constituent  parts  of  the  one 
absolute  spirit.  They  contend  that  this  doctrine,  by  denying 
the  very  nature  of  a  person,  which  is  to  possess  a  private 
and  unsharable  experience,  ends  by  denying  that  the  abso¬ 
lute  can  be  a  personality  or  spirit.  There  is  nothing  in  our 
normal  and  sane  experience  which  entitles  us  to  say  that 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM 


417 


one  person  can  be  literally  contained  in  another  person. 
Only  in  diseased  selves  do  we  find  anything  of  this  sort,  and 
the  partial  selves  of  a  disordered  self  are  not  true  selves. 
Hence,  the  pluralistic  personalist  insists  that  monistic  or 
singularistic  personal  idealism  is  a  contradiction  in  terms. 
One  self  simply  cannot  be  part  of  another  self.  But  the 
pluralistic  personalist  insists,  with  equal  emphasis,  that  it 
belongs  to  the  very  essence  of  personality  to  exist  only  in 
social  relationships  with  other  persons.  Therefore,  for  him, 
ultimate  reality,  or  reality  at  its  highest  level  (and,  in  the 
case  of  the  personal  idealists,  all  reality)  consists  of  a  society 
or  community  of  selves  living  incessantly  in  communion 
with  one  another.  Accepting,  in  a  broad  sense,  the  reality 
of  the  temporal  process  of  evolution,  which  develops  in  its 
various  stages,  from  the  lowest  organisms  up  to  man,  and 
presumably  higher,  as  a  creative  process,  in  which  there 
appear,  at  critical  intervals,  significant  new  levels  of  or¬ 
ganization,  meaning  and  value ;  the  pluralists  argue  that, 
as  this  process  reaches  higher  and  higher  levels  of  achieve¬ 
ment,  it  becomes  at  once  more  personal  and  more  social. 
For  individual  personality  and  community  are  two  comple¬ 
mentary  aspects  of  the  same  reality.  In  humanity,  social 
development  has  been  at  once  the  condition  and  the  result 
of  increasing  moralization  and  increasing  intellectualization 
of  life.  The  evolution  of  man,  as  a  cultural  being,  has  been 
a  social  evolution,  in  which  language,  the  arts,  and  sciences, 
religion  and  philosophy  have  appeared,  as  forms  of  spiritual 
achievements  and  the  conditions  of  higher  achievement. 

Since  the  selves  or  monads,  who  are  the  immediate 
creators  and  bearers  of  the  whole  process  of  spiritual 
evolution,  develop  by  interaction  and  cooperation,  and  in  the 
direction  of  fuller  personality,  the  life  of  the  community 
of  persons  implies  the  reality  of  a  Perfect  Self  or  Person, 
who  is  the  Source  of  the  whole  system,  the  Ground  of  its 
continuous  movement  towards  fuller  personal  and  com- 


418 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


munal  life,  and  the  eternally  realized  Ideal  or  goal  of  the 
life  of  spirits. 

Since  the  fuller  the  personality  of  a  finite  member  of  the 
cosmic  society,  the  more  self-determination  or  rational  free¬ 
dom  and  responsibility  he  exercises,  finite  selves  are  free  to 
err  and  sin.  God  has  not  willed  a  world  of  mere  mechanism, 
but  a  society  of  spirits  who  can  willingly  cooperate  with 
him,  can  oppose  him  within  limits,  can  seek  and  find  har¬ 
monious  life  with  him  as  the  great  Other  Self,  the  perfect 
comrade.  The  possibility  and  the  actuality  of  evil  are  due 
to  the  fact  that  finite  selves  develop  into  freedom  by  a  life 
of  experiment  and  choice.  God  is  not  limited  from  without. 
Nor  does  he,  at  some  instant  or  stage  in  time,  limit  himself. 
It  is  his  will  to  create  creators ,  free  moral  agents  who  can 
grow  into  wisdom  and  conscious  cooperation  with  Him. 
The  evil  in  the  world  is  incidental  to  the  development  of 
selves.  The  goal  towards  which  the  whole  creation  moves, 
through  its  striving  and  suffering,  is  a  community  of  ethical 
and  rational  spirits.  Selves  are  generated  in  time,  but  they 
must  be  immortal,  since  they  alone  are  the  bearers  and 
achievers  of  Values.  Values  exist  only  in  persons,  therefore 
persons  must  be  immortal.  Thus,  the  plural  reality  of  the 
community  of  persons  has  its  ground  and  its  goal  in  God. 
Personalistic  pluralism  of  this  type  ends  in  theism. 

This  view  is  persuasively  presented  in  James  Ward’s 
The  Realm  of  Ends.  W.  It.  Sorley,  in  his  Moral  Values 
and  the  Idea  of  God ,  presents  a  similar  conclusion  from  the 
special  angle  of  a  study  of  values.  A.  Seth  Pringle-Pattison, 
in  his  beautifully  written  book,  The  Idea  of  God  in  the 
Light  of  Recent  Philosophy,  tries  to  balance  more  evenly 
than  Ward  the  respective  interests  of  singularism  and 
pluralism.  He  dissents  from  Ward’s  view  that  physical 
nature  can  be  regarded  as  an  assemblage  of  finite  spirits  or 
monads.  He  also  criticizes  the  theory  of  Ward  that  there  is 
contingency  or  chance  in  the  universe  and  that  the  laws  of 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM 


419 


nature  can  be  regarded  as  the  expression  of  habits  or 
automatisms  acquired  by  the  psychical  monads.  Pringle- 
Pattison  holds  that  there  is  a  real  material  order,  which  is 
the  substructure  for  the  life  of  personality.  Persons  are 
not  transitory  expressions  or  modifications  of  the  Absolute. 
But  God  is  immanent  in  human  life  and  in  nature.  God  is 
a  superpersonal  reality,  the  absolute  being  who  is  the 
ground  of  all  things.  He  lives  by  imparting  Himself  to 
men.  His  essence  is  creative  and  self-imparting  Love. 
There  is  purposive  growth  in  the  universe,  since  it  exists 
to  realize  the  good  through  the  fruition  of  personality.  But 
God  does  not  grow.  Incarnation  is  His  eternal  Will,  His 
everlasting  purpose,  since  He  is  self-imparting  Love;  “the 
ultimate  conception  of  God  is  not  that  of  a  preexistent 
Creator  but,  as  it  is  for  religion,  that  of  the  eternal 
Redeemer  of  the  world”  (The  Idea  of  God,  p.  412).  “The 
universe  is  in  no  sense  a  finished  fact ;  it  is  an  act ,  a  con¬ 
tinuous  life  or  process  which  (to  speak  in  terms  of  time) 
is  perpetually  being  accomplished  ’  ’  {Ibicl.,  p.  413 ) .  Pringle- 
Pattison’s  book  is  a  fine  interpretation  of  Christian  theistic 
faith.  Mention  should  be  made  of  the  school  of  theistic 
personalism  developed  in  America  by  B.  P.  Bowne. 

G.  H.  Howison,  in  his  Limits  of  Evolution,  argues  that 
ultimate  reality  must  be  a  society  of  persons,  since  the 
recognition  by  one  person  of  his  own  selfhood  implies  the 
like  recognition  of  other  selves.  And  God,  the  perfect 
Person,  must  exist  as  the  Supreme  Instance  and  Exemplar 
of  the  ideal  of  personality.  Logically,  the  single  ethical 
individual  implies  a  society,  and  the  society  implies  a  per¬ 
fect  Individual.  While  He  is  the  eternally  real  instance  of 
perfect  selfhood,  God  is  not  the  creator ;  all  other  selves 
are  eternal. 

H.  Rashdall  emphasizes  the  impenetrability,  or  self- 
inclosedness,  of  all  persons.  Thus  far,  he  is  an  out-and-out 
pluralist.  But  he  argues,  in  Berkeleyan  fashion  that,  since 


420 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


nothing  exists  except  in  and  for  a  mind,  and  since  the  world 
of  selves  is  a  whole  or  system,  God  must  exist  as  the  ground 
of  the  whole  system.  Since  selves  are  self-determining,  and 
there  is  evil,  and  God  cannot  be  the  author  of  evil,  He  is 
finite.  He  limits  himself  in  order  that  moral  agents  may 
enjoy  individual  responsibility.  The  absolute  reality  is  the 
society  or  community,  consisting  of  God  and  other  spirits. 
God  is  the  creator.  If,  as  he  holds,  selves  are  mutually 
exclusive  centers  of  consciousness,  it  is  difficult  to  see  how 
Rashdall  can  avoid  the  inference  that  God  is  just  a  some¬ 
what  superior  personality,  but  not  essentially  different  from 
a  man. 

A  radically  finitistic  form  of  pluralism  is  to  be  found  in 
the  writings  of  William  James  (especially  in  his  A  Plural¬ 
istic  Universe)  and  F.  C.  S.  Schiller,  the  English  pragmatist, 
or  “humanist”  as  he  prefers  to  call  himself  (see,  especially, 
his  Riddles  of  the  Sphinx,  second  edition).  Here  we  have 
the  picture  of  God,  not,  indeed,  as  a  being  who  is  shut  out 
from  the  human  self ;  for  James  thinks  that,  through  his 
subsconscious  life,  man  is  probably  in  immediate  contact 
with  God ;  but  the  picture  of  God  as  a  finite  superhuman 
agent  working  for  good,  and  helping  man  in  the  struggle 
against  brute  accident  and  evil.  God  is  hindered  by  some 
mysterious  force  outside  Himself.  He  needs  man’s  aid,  as 
man  needs  His  aid.  We  have  the  right  to  believe,  that,  in 
the  long  run,  God  and  man  wTill  win  out  in  this  great  moral 
epic,  of  which  the  scene  is  the  universe,  or,  rather,  the 
multiverse.  Complete  harmony  and  a  real  universe  may 
ensue  in  time.  Schiller  thinks  that,  when  the  blissful 
triumph  does  come,  time  will  pass  into  eternity.  H.  G. 
Wells,  in  God  the  Invisible  King,  argues,  in  similar  fashion, 
that  there  are  two  supernatural  Beings — the  Veiled  Being 
who  is  responsible  for  the  universe  with  all  its  badness,  and 
God,  our  great  Companion  and  Helper,  who  is  finite.  The 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM 


421 


doctrine  traces  descent,  through  John  Stuart  Mill,  to  the 
Gnostics  and  the  ancient  Persian  dualism.  It  seems  to 
find  favor  with  some  pragmatically  minded  theologians,  who 
seem  anxious  to  make  God  so  good  a  democrat  that  they 
deprive  Him  of  all  monarchical  or  even  aristocratic  quali¬ 
ties.  To  my  mind,  it  empties  religion  of  all  meaning. 
Adoration  is  as  essential  a  feature  of  religion  as  fellowship. 
As  I  understand  religion,  in  it  man  seeks  communion  with 
One  whom  he  can  worship. 

The  argument  for  a  finite  God  runs  as  follows : 

The  postulate  of  moral  responsibility  and  the  existence 
of  the  evil  in  the  world,  in  the  shape  of  imperfection,  failure, 
waste,  undeserved  suffering,  injustice,  cruelty,  the  “whole 
burden  and  weary  weight  of  this  unintelligible  world” — 
all  these  considerations,  say  our  “finitists,  ”  are  best  met 
by  the  doctrine  that,  while  there  is  a  unifying  power  and 
will  and  intelligence  in  the  world,  it  is  a  finite,  super¬ 
human  spirit.  In  other  words,  God,  or  the  highest  being, 
is  not  the  absolute  self  or  all-dominating,  all-inclusive  uni¬ 
fier  but  the  permanent  president  of  a  democracy  of  selves, 
working  with  his  more  or  less  unruly  constituents,  and 
amidst  external  hindrances,  to  make  the  world  a  more 
orderly,  shipshape  or  harmonious  place ;  in  other  words, 
to  turn  the  multiverse  into  as  much  of  a  universe  as  pos¬ 
sible.  This  theory  escapes  the  problem  of ‘evil,  that  is,  of 
squaring  the  evil  in  the  world  with  the  goodness  and  powTer 
of  God,  by  accepting  a  limited  God.  Its  moral  world  is 
— God  and  Company  with  assets  and  liabilities  limited. 
It  seems  to  find  an  empirical  basis  in  the  feeling  of  privacy 
and  uniqueness  which  belongs  to  selfhood.  Nevertheless, 
it  is  a  logically  defective  position ;  and,  moreover,  fails  to 
solve  the  moral  difficulties  which  are  among  the  chief 
motives  for  taking  it  up. 

For:  (1)  If  we  are  to  accept  pluralism,  and  thus  deny 


422 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


that  there  is  a  universe  at  all,  there  are  no  cogent  grounds 
for  interpreting  our  multiverse  idealistically  or  even  theisti- 
cally.  No  doubt  the  man  who  craves  companionship  with, 
and  aid  from,  the  superordinary,  may,  if  he  chooses,  believe 
in  superior,  spiritual  beings,  and  in  one  who  is  the  most 
superior  of  all ;  but,  logically,  in  such  case  the  hindrances 
and  contingencies  to  which  such  a  being  would  be  subject 
might  well,  in  relation  to  the  whole  mess  of  pluralistic 
reality,  be  but  little  less  than  those  to  which  man,  in  his 
naked  aloneness,  would  be  subject.  Therefore  the  aid  and 
comfort  which  such  a  finite  God  would  render  to  the  soul 
of  man  would  probably  be  slight.  God  and  man  might  lean 
on  one  another  during  the  cyclones  of  the  cosmic  weather, 
without  either  affording  the  other  much  support.  AVhat 
the  soul  of  man  seeks,  when  in  distress  of  weather,  is  a  port 
that  is  absolutely  a  port ,  a  sure  refuge.  The  only  cogent 
and  dependable  form  of  idealism  or  theism  is  monistic  or 
cosmical ;  the  unity  of  the  universe  as  grounded  in  the  all- 
sustaining  mind  or  will-reason.  If  selves  are  separate  and 
independent  entities,  who  may  “go  it  alone,”  there  is  no 
good  reason  why  things  other  than  selves  should  not  be 
equally  so.  Personalistic  pluralism  leaves  us  just  where 
we  were,  in  the  naive  position  that  the  world  is  only  a 
miscellaneous  collection  of  things.  (2)  The  doctrine  that 
persons  are  really  “windowless  monads,”  separate  self- 
inclosed  entities,  does  not  square  with  the  facts  of  social 
life  and  intercourse,  nor  with  the  psychology  of  the  develop¬ 
ment  and  disassociation  of  selves.  (3)  Personalistic  plural¬ 
ism  leaves  us  with  an  unreconciled  ethical  and  cosmological 
dualism  on  our  hands.  Its  moral  world  really  is  God  and 
Company,  with  limited  assets  and  unlimited  liabilities.  In 
trying  to  square  the  reality  of  evil  with  the  reality  of 
superhuman,  but  limited,  good,  it  makes  evil  eternal  or 
coeval  with  good  and  independent  of  it.  If  evil  be  a 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM 


423 


metaphysical  surd,  an  eternal,  cosmical  principle,  by  what 
right  does  the  personal  idealist  assume  that  its  power  can 
and  will  surely  be  permanently  reduced  by  the  synergistic 
efforts  of  God  and  man?  If  the  good  be  hindered  and 
thwarted  by  an  opposite  principle,  independent  of  itself, 
then  how  can  we  reasonably  believe  that  the  world  whole 
will  become  better  as  it  becomes  more  of  a  whole?  How 
do  we  know  that  it  is  becoming  more  of  a  whole?  If  evil 
be  outside  the  reach  of  the  spiritual  world  of  God  or  good, 
it  must  remain  an  irremovable  obstacle.  If  it  be  not 
outside,  then  the  possibility  of  evil,  and,  indeed,  its  ever 
recurring  actuality,  is  a  condition  of  the  good.  The  real 
and  trustworthy  possibility  of  our  human  world  becoming 
better  presupposes  that  the  structure  or  order  of  the  uni¬ 
verse  is  permanently  good,  that  is,  better  than  we  some¬ 
times  find  our  empirical  human  world  to  be.  And  our 
main  business  is  to  discover  this  truth  and  act  upon  it. 
There  is  very  slight  hope  that  we  human  beings  can  re¬ 
make  the  universe  to  suit  our  desires.  I  feel  with  Thomas 
Carlyle  who,  when  it  was  reported  to  him  that  Margaret 
Fuller,  the  Transcendentalist,  said  she  accepted  the  uni¬ 
verse,  commented,  ‘ 1  Egad !  she ’d  better.  ”  It  is  even  doubtful 
whether  we  would  make  a  very  good  job  of  the  remaking,  if 
it  were  put  in  our  hands.  But  there  is  good  hope  that,  if 
we  can  discover  something  of  the  real  and  eternal  meaning 
of  the  whole  spectacle  and  business,  we  may  remake  human 
life  in  the  likeness  thereof.  It  seems  to  me  that  some  of  the 
motives  of  personalistic  pluralism,  and  connected  forms 
of  so-called  humanism  and  pragmatism  are  the  conse¬ 
quences  of  an  unhealthy  preoccupation  with  the  all-too- 
human,  with  the  small  change  and  parochialism,  which 
lays  undue  stress  on  the  accidents,  freaks  and  ephemeral- 
ities  of  human  life,  and  fusses  over  these  things  with 
exaggerated  emphasis.  Instead  we  should  stay  ourselves 


424 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


by  keeping  company  with  the  universal  and  stable  and 
orderly  in  nature  and  the  historical  world.7 

Indeed,  personalistic  pluralism  is  in  a  state  of  unstable 
equilibrium.  It  must  either  go  over  to  absolutism  in  some 
form,  or  admit  that  its  God  is  neither  the  creator  nor 
governor  of  things,  but  only  a  somewhat  superhuman  prod¬ 
uct,  like  man,  of  the  anarchical  flux  of  reality.  If  reality  be 
evolving,  by  chance,  out  of  the  primordial  and  indeterminate 
vortex,  taking  on  habits  of  more  regular  behavior  and 
getting  personalized,  by  chance,  too;  no  doubt  the  whole 
process  is  very  interesting.  But  one  does  not  care  to  wor¬ 
ship  even  a  superhuman  product  of  the  vortical  flux. 

In  sum,  personalistic  pluralism  faces  this  dilemma — 
either  God  is  not  continuously  immanent  in  both  Nature 
and  Man ,  in  which  case  he  is  either  a  finite  part  of  the 
world-whole  or  He  is  an  absentee  landlord  who  intervenes  but 
occasionally  (a  conception  repugnant  to  scientific  think¬ 
ing)  ;  or  God  is  immanent  in  both  Nature  and  Man,  in  which 
case  He  is  not  a  person  alongside  other  finite  persons.  If 
one  choose  the  latter  horn  of  the  dilemma,  God  must  be  the 
living  and  absolute  Spirit  of  Totality,  energizing  in  various 
degrees  of  fullness  in  the  successive  planes  of  empirical 


"  I  have  not  discussed  above  the  peculiar  type  of  personalistic 
pluralism  developed  by  Mr.  J.  M.  E.  McTaggart  in  liis  Studies  in 
Hegelian  Cosmology  and  Some  Dogmas  of  Religion.  Mr.  McTag¬ 
gart  thinks  reality  is  an  eternal  system  or  society  of  selves,  with¬ 
out  any  God  or  conscious  unity  and  ground.  His  view  seems  to 
have  two  fatal  defects — (1)  It  is  inconsistent  with  the  facts  of 
biological  and  psychological  development.  Human  selves  clearly 
seem  to  have  originated  and  to  have  developmental  histories.  It 
makes  the  whole  realm  of  time  and  history  an  illusion.  It  is,  of 
course,  a  form  of  the  doctrine  of  reincarnation.  Like  all  attempts 
at  a  consistent  doctrine  of  the  eternity  and  reincarnation  of  the 
human  soul,  it  reduces  the  significance  of  the  present  temporal 
order  to  practical  nothingness.  (2)  I  do  not  see  how  there  can 
be  any  real  and  abiding  principle  or  ground  of  unity  for  a  society 
of  selves,  no  member  of  which  is  the  conscious  or  active  ground 
of  the  social  whole.  As  some  one  has  wittily  said,  the  unity  of  the 
cosmos  in  this  system  is  like  the  unity  of  a  college  the  members 
of  which  are  on  a  perpetual  vacation. 


SINGULAR!  SM  AND  PLURALISM 


425 


reality,  from  the  cosmic  star-dust  up  to  man  and  higher 
finite  beings  than  man.  If  He  be  not  the  sovereign  spirit 
of  the  whole  universe,  He  is  only  a  conditioned  part  thereof. 
He  cannot  be  both. 

Leibnitz’s  view  is  a  pluralism  with  a  singularistic  basis, 
and  it  is  a  form  of  pluralism  that  is  most  profoundly 
original.  The  significant  thing  for  us  here  is  that  the  world 
is  regarded  as  a  society  of  selves,  and  these  members  con¬ 
stitute  the  society  because  of  a  preestablished  harmony  or 
unity.  The  members  of  the  society  have  originated  from 
God.  God  brings  self-determining  individuals  into  exist¬ 
ence  and  these  develop  into  a  fuller  selfhood.  The  universe 
is  therefore  a  developing  one  and  all  individuals,  within 
limits  set  by  the  supreme  monad,  are  self-determining. 
Leibnitz  thus  has  a  creative  ground  of  the  existence  of 
the  selves.8  This  view  has  certain  defects.  First,  the  Leib- 
nitzian  conception  of  evolution  is  not  that  of  to-day. 
Evolution  for  Leibnitz  is  the  mere  unfolding  of  what  is 
already  implicit  in  the  germ.  Our  conception  to-day  is 
epigenetic.  Leibnitz’s  conception  is  the  old  Chinese  box 
theory  of  evolution.  The  biologist  of  to-day  argues,  on 
the  basis  of  experimental  findings,  that  the  organisms 
and  selves  are  not  completely  self-inclosed ;  they  interact 
and  thus  they  are  modified. 

The  second  point  of  weakness  in  the  Leibnitzian  concep¬ 
tion  is  his  failure  to  make  an  organic  connection  between 
the  unity  of  experience  and  its  manyness.  With  these 
two  aspects  corrected,  we  can  to-day  accept  the  theory  of 
Leibnitz. 

VII.  A  Synthesis  of  Singularism  and  Pluralism 

I  regard  the  world  of  selves  as  generated  in  time  by 
the  creative  activity  of  the  world  ground,  and  I  further 


8  See,  further,  Chapter  XVIII,  2. 


426 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


regard  this  process  of  generation  as  being  without  either 
beginning  or  end.  The  development  of  individuals  in  the 
time-process  consists  in  their  education  into  richer  individ¬ 
uality.  The  goal  of  the  process  is  the  attainment  of  the 
fullest  possible  personality. 

Reality  I  conceive  to  include  a  process  and  evolution  in 
time,  and  the  goal  of  this  process  is  the  realization  of  self¬ 
hood  in  society.  Inasmuch  as  there  must  be  a  source  for 
the  energy  and  the  individuality  of  individuals,  and  inas¬ 
much  as  evolution  takes  specific  direction,  that  is,  moves 
towards  certain  values,  I  regard  God  as  at  once  the  imma¬ 
nent  ground  of  the  process  and  the  conserver  of  its  values. 
The  world  is  a  dependent  reality,  and  in  it  selves  have  a 
relatively  higher  degree  of  independence  than  do  lower 
beings.  There  are  thus  stages  and  degrees  of  individuality, 
freedom,  and  independence,  evolved  in  the  process  of  evolu¬ 
tion.  The  human  self  is  free  and  responsible  within  limits 
and  the  human  self  is  clearly  the  product  of  the  whole 
process,  since  it  is  an  integral  part  thereof. 

The  motives  and  facts  that  are  involved  in  Singularism 
and  Pluralism  might  be  reconciled  in  the  following  way. 
Let  me  say  here,  however,  as  an  indirect  mode  of  stating 
the  reconciling  position,  that  there  are  two  objections  to 
extreme  Singularism.  These  objections  are:  (1)  That 
Singularism  does  not  give  a  satisfactory  interpretation  of 
the  human  self.  The  invariable  tendency  of  extreme  Singu¬ 
larism  is  to  deprive  human  individuality  of  its  place  and 
worth  in  reality.  It  tends  to  derealize  the  human  self  by 
reducing  it  to  a  mere  appearance  of  an  ineffable  absolute ; 
personality  becomes  but  a  momentary  and  insignificant 
expression  of  the  timeless  Absolute.  It  is  not  unjust  to 
say,  if  extreme  Singularism  is  true,  then  our  individuality, 
our  freedom,  our  responsibility,  our  meaning,  and  our 
worth,  are  only  egotistical  allusions.  This  may  be  true. 
Perhaps  we  are  not  any  more  significant  than 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM 


427 


The  flies  of  latter  spring-, 

That  lay  their  eggs,  and  sting  and  sing, 

And  weave  their  petty  cells  and  die. 

It  is  strange,  however,  that  our  life  should  have  such 
a  sharp  tang,  if  this  be  all  there  is  to  life.  It  is  equally 
strange  that  life  should  appear  to  exist  in  the  only  way  in 
which  it  immediately  appears  to  exist,  that  is,  as  the 
life  of  distinct  and  separate  individuals.  What  we  actually 
experience  is  individualized  striving,  suffering,  hoping, 
dreaming,  achieving,  and  even  hoping  when  achievement 
falls  short.  Before  we  abandon  our  common  sense  convic¬ 
tion  as  to  the  reality  of  our  individuality,  we  shall  claim 
the  right  to  be  shown  why  we  should  give  up  this  con¬ 
viction.  (2)  The  second  objection  is  that  abstract  Singular- 
ism  regards  the  absolute  as  timeless  and  static.  Hegel 
insists  that  reality  is  a  process.  Royce  also  repeatedly 
lays  great  emphasis  upon  the  purposive  and  volitional 
character  of  selfhood.  Bosanquet  also  insists  on  the  signifi¬ 
cance,  for  reality,  of  natural  evolution  and  cultural  develop¬ 
ment.  But  the  process,  as  regarded  by  these  men,  seems  to 
be  more  a  function  of  logical  implication  than  of  actual 
causal  sequences.  Royce  goes  so  far  in  his  latest  work  as  to 
conceive  God  as  the  spirit  of  the  beloved  community,  and 
here  he  really  abandons  the  timeless  absolute.  But  perhaps 
all  that  the  great  idealists  mean  is  that  there  is  an  enduring 
order  of  meanings  and  values  that  persists  in  and  realizes 
itself  in  the  time  process.  If  so,  I  agree  with  them.  What 
conception  can  we  form  of  a  reality  in  which  there  is  no 
temporal  movement  ?  Evolution  as  a  natural  process  ante¬ 
cedent  to  human  history ;  history,  which  is  but  the  story  of 
the  evolution  of  human  culture  as  this  has  veered  in  its  ups 
and  downs ;  and  the  whole  innumerable  series  of  developing 
individuals — these  are  all  temporal  processes  and  they  can¬ 
not  be  reduced  to  something  which  is  not  temporal.  With 
what  special  acuteness  does  the  average  student  realize  a  few 


428 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


days  before  the  finals  what  a  relentless  master  time  is? 
It  is  only  when  care  free  that  we  forget  time.  Dem  Glilck- 
lichen  schlagt  Tceine  Stunde. 

Our  world  is  a  temporal  world,  and,  for  my  part,  I  can 
accept  no  philosophy  which  begins  with  a  mystical  flight 
from  the  temporal  world.  On  the  other  hand,  the  numeri¬ 
cal  Monist  or  Singular ist  urges  against  the  Pluralist  that 
the  universe  is  one,  that  there  is  a  unity  of  structure,  or, 
as  Royce  expresses  it,  there  is  a  unity  in  the  types  of  order 
in  the  world.  No  doubt  all  things  are  related  in  some 
fashion.  Coexistence  in  space  is  one  form  of  relation,  but 
this  is  not  necessarily  a  very  significant  or  relevant  type 
of  relation.  Culture  relations,  such  as  are  ours  by  virtue 
of  our  life  in  the  university,  are  more  significant  than  our 
mere  spatial  relations  on  the  campus.  All  events  are  tem¬ 
porally  related ;  this  also  may  or  may  not  be  a  very  sig¬ 
nificant  type  of  relation.  Singularism  is  right  in  insisting 
upon  the  existence  of  some  sort  of  relation,  but  it  errs  in 
assuming  that  all  forms  of  relations  may  be  ultimately 
reduced  to  the  whole-part  type.  I  agree  with  the  Singu- 
larists  that  there  is  some  sort  of  unity  or  continuity  in  the 
world,  but  I  do  not  agree  that  all  the  different  types  of 
empirical  relations  can  be  merged  so  as  to  make  everything 
a  part  of  one  substance  or  cosmic  self.  There  is  a  unity  of 
the  solar  system ;  there  is  a  unity  of  a  fine  machine,  for  ex¬ 
ample,  a  watch ;  there  is  a  unity  of  a  living  organism ;  and 
finally,  there  is  a  unity  of  a  society  of  like-minded  beings. 
The  differences  between  these  unities  are  much  more  signifi¬ 
cant  than  the  likenesses,  and  I  see  no  way  of  discovering 
some  common  denominator  which  will  effect  a  reduction 
of  these  unities  to  one.  The  tendency  of  the  Singularist 
has  been  to  reduce  all  forms  of  unity  to  that  of  the 
abstract  unity  of  the  universe,  and  then,  subsequent  to 
this  reduction,  he  emotionally  glosses  over  this  type  of 
unity  with  religious  predicates.  He  baptizes  this  abstract 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM 


429 


unity  with  the  most  acute  form  of  emotional  experience. 

Is  it  not  more  reasonable  to  suppose  something  of  the 
following  order,  namely,  rather  than  reduce  all  kinds  of 
unities  to  one  type,  let  us  conceive  a  world  ground  which 
is  not  identical  with  any  or  all  of  these  special  types  of 
unity?  Such  an  assumption  would  enable  us  to  take  full 
cognizance  of  all  the  facts  of  Singularism  and  Pluralism. 
God,  the  world  ground,  is  the  ultimate  source  of  whatever 
type  of  unity  there  is  in  any  of  these  various  systems.  God 
in  his  own  interior  being  is  richer  than  the  sum  of  the 
unities  that  we  find  in  the  universe.  There  is  a  world  of 
partly  independent,  responsible  individuals.  This  world  is 
not  eternally  complete,  and  God  shares  in  its  growth.  God 
is  not  an  absentee  Deity  dwelling  apart  from  the  grime 
of  this  universe.  He  is  the  energizing  good,  and  at  this  point 
our  view  is  at  one  with  Plato’s.  God  is  not  a  One  in 
which  all  individuals  are  swallowed  up  and  disappear. 

The  problem  of  the  one  and  the  many  involves  the 
place  and  the  status  of  individuality  in  the  world.  The 
Singular ist  is  the  extreme  realist.  For  him  the  particular 
is  absorbed  in  the  unity.  The  extreme  Pluralist  dissolves 
all  unity ;  thus  he  is  a  revised  edition  of  the  extreme  nom¬ 
inalist  of  former  days.  For  him  there  are  no  universals 
and  no  general  types  of  relations  in  the  objective  world. 
The  mediating  position  is  that  we  make  the  relations  by 
reflecting  on  the  data  of  experience  and  generalizing  upon 
the  basis  of  the  results  of  reflection,  but  this  generalization 
rests  upon  the  real  order  that  is  in  the  world. 

Objective  social  idealism  is  the  only  form  of  Singularism 
that  can  be  worked  out  into  a  consistent  and  comprehen¬ 
sible  theory.  For  Idealism  presents  the  only  clear  and 
plausible  conception  of  how  the  elements  of  the  real  world 
can  constitute  a  unitary  or  systematic  whole  of  being,  and 
yet  each  be  a  contributing  member.  Materialism  cannot  do 
this;  for,  if  the  whole  be  made  up  of  atomic  units,  these 


430 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


must  be  wholly  external  to  one  another,  and  no  clear  con¬ 
ception  can  be  given,  as  to  how  they  can  be  interdependent 
parts  of  one  whole.  If  the  atoms  are  deformations  or  cen¬ 
ters  of  tension  in  an  ether  (the  continuous  fluid),  then 
either  they  are  not  really  atoms,  that  is,  not  discrete  and 
indivisible  units,  or  the  ether  is  not  really  continuous.  The 
same  objection  will  hold  if  the  units  are  called  electrons. 
Dualism  is  open  to  the  same  criticism  in  its  conception 
of  matter ;  and,  besides,  it  does  not  explain  how  body  and 
mind  can  be  interacting  elements  in  reality,  if  they  are 
not  interdependent.  Psychophysical  parallelism  leaves  us 
with  two  unsolved  problems  on  our  hands:  (1)  why  two  so 
absolutely  opposed  entities  as  body  and  mind  should  be 
completely  parallel,  and  (2)  how  a  succession  of  bodily 
states  and  mental  states  can  be  parallel. 

According  to  the  Idealistic  type  of  Singularism,  the  posi¬ 
tion  and  relations  of  every  particular  member  in  the  whole 
system  of  reality  to  the  whole,  is  analogous  to  the  position 
and  relations  of  any  special  mental  system  or  complex 
of  ideas,  feelings,  and  impulses  in  an  individual  mind  to 
that  mind  as  a  whole.  Let  us  take  the  mind  of  a  great  and 
comprehensive  genius,  Plato,  Dante,  Shakespeare,  Goethe, 
or  a  great  scholar  like  the  late  Lord  Acton  or  Josiah  Royce, 
or  a  great  statesman,  such  as  William  Pitt  or  Abraham 
Lincoln.  The  man,  we  say,  was  many-sided;  that  means 
that  he  had  a  great  variety  of  mental  complexes  or  systems, 
each  organized  by  and  permeated  or  transformed  by  a 
central  and  controlling  idea  or  purpose.  We  say  that  he 
was  a  great  individuality  or  personality,  not  a  collection  of 
systems ;  that  means  that  all  the  varied  complexes  in  his 
mind  were  organized  into  a  central  unity.  But,  if  the 
highest  members  in  the  world  system  are  selves  or  persons, 
I  cannot  see  by  what  right  one  contends  that  these  members 
have  no  more  power  self-determination  in  the  whole  than 
any  special  complex  of  ideas  in  my  mind  has  in  that  mind. 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM 


431 


No  doubt,  especially  when  an  individual  is  obsessed  by 
fixed  ideas,  in  the  case  of  diseased  personality  or  lunacy, 
the  special  complex  of  ideas  may  run  the  entire  self.  But 
this  would  be  a  very  poor  sort  of  case  to  argue  from.  In 
the  normal  mind,  the  whole  self  grows  and  functions  by 
complementary  processes  of  unification  and  comprehension. 

Moreover,  if  the  whole  of  reality  be  a  living  system  it 
must  include  real  development,  evolution,  growth  or  prog¬ 
ress  in  its  members.  It  cannot  be  a  unity  which  simply 
marks  time  or  revolves  eternally  in  a  circle.  Therefore, 
it  seems  to  me,  the  best  analogy,  for  the  nature  of  the 
unity  and  continuity  of  the  universe,  is  that  of  a  society  of 
selves,  animated  and  guided  by  a  central  unity  of  ideal  and 
purpose,  which  unity,  from  the  standpoint  of  religion, 
would  be  the  sustaining  ground  of  the  whole  society.  A 
society  of  persons,  in  which  each  member’s  will  reflects, 
however  imperfectly  and  intermittently,  the  spirit,  ideal, 
aim  or  principle,  of  the  whole  society  is  a  richer,  completer, 
and  relatively  more  self-dependent  or  substantial  unity 
than  the  unity  of  any  individual  mind.  A  mental  organ¬ 
ization  is  a  living  and  self-determining  and  progressive 
whole  or  unity,  in  a  sense  in  which  no  other  whole  is.  The 
principle  of  the  whole  pervades  and  lives  in  every  one  of 
the  parts  and  every  member  lives  by  embodying  the  prin¬ 
ciple  of  the  whole.  But,  in  a  social  whole,  these  comple¬ 
mentary  truths  are  more  fully  exemplified  than  in  an 
individual  mind.  For  the  mind  of  society  both  makes,  and 
is  remade  by,  the  minds  of  its  individual  members.  But 
even  the  leaders  and  renovators  of  society  achieve  their 
work,  not  by  destroying,  but  by  interpreting  and  ful¬ 
filling  the  intent  of  the  social  will.  Historically,  religion 
is  the  incarnation  of  the  ideal  of  the  social  will.  God,  in 
the  highest  and  most  progressive  forms  of  religion,  is  not 
the  single  ego  which  swallows  up  the  cosmos.  In  every 
form  of  spiritual  religion,  other  than  those  aberrant  forms 


432 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


of  mysticism  in  which  the  defeated  soul  flees  from  the 
world,  God  is  the  supreme  social  self. 

In  brief,  our  standpoint  is  an  objective  social  idealism: 
God  is  the  transcendent  gromid  of  the  community  of  selves, 
not  the  merely  immanent  and  impersonal  spirit  of  the 
community.  But  I  cannot  understand  how,  in  a  spiritual 
universe,  or  even  in  a  merely  vital  universe,  there  can  be 
growth  or  change  in  individual  members  that  does  not 
affect  the  spirit  of  the  whole.  St.  Paul’s  words,  “If  one 
member  suffer,  all  the  members  suffer  with  it,  and  if  one 
member  rejoice,  all  the  members  rejoice  with  it,”  seem 
to  me  profoundly  true  of  the  universe. 

Before  bringing  to  a  close  this  grand  tour  in  which  we 
have  touched  only  the  high  spots  and  have  seen  only  a 
few  of  the  most  important  sights,  let  me  give  a  few  words 
as  to  the  moral  and  religious  implications  of  pluralism. 
The  standpoint  of  Pluralism  is  melioristic.  The  world 
may  become  better.  It  is  not  absolute  optimism,  the  view¬ 
point  that  all  is  well  with  the  world,  nor  is  it  absolute 
pessimism,  the  view  that  the  world  is  irretrievably  bad. 
From  our  standpoint  also  we  must  admit  that  there  are  evil, 
sin  and  suffering  here.  These  really  take  place,  but  they 
can  be  regarded  as  the  conditions  for  the  development  of 
free  personalities.  They  are  a  part  of  the  process  of  educa¬ 
tion.  But  the  superlative  character  of  the  good  renders 
all  this  suffering  excusable.  One  very  interesting  ques¬ 
tion  emerges  at  this  point.  Does  the  very  ubiquity  of  evil, 
sin  and  suffering,  suggest  the  question  as  to  whether  there 
is  not  some  obtrusive  element  which  forces  us  to  admit  a 
dualistic  strain  in  the  structure  of  the  universe  ?  Berg¬ 
son ’s  suggestion  at  this  point  is  that  such  is  the  case.  The 
Life  force  ever  strives  upward,  matter  ever  pulls  down¬ 
ward.  (Plato  recognizes  a  similar  situation.) 


SINGULARISM  AND  PLURALISM 


433 


References 

*  Avey,  A.  E.,  Readings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  XX. 

*  Bowne,  B.  P.,  Personalism,  Philosophy  of  Theism,  and  Meta¬ 

physics. 

Bradley,  Appearance  and  Reality,  especially  Chapters  XIV, 
XV,  XVI. 

Bosanquet,  B.,  The  Principle  of  Individuality  and  Value,  espe¬ 
cially  Lectures  VI,  VII,  IX,  and  X. 

*  Calkins,  M.  W.,  The  Persistent  Problems  of  Philosophy, 

Chapters  IV,  VIII,  X,  XI. 

Hegel,  Logic,  and  Philosophy  of  Mind  (translated  by  Wallace). 

*  Howison,  G.  H.,  The  Limits  of  Evolution. 

Hugel,  F.  von,  Eternal  Life. 

*  James,  William,  A  Pluralistic  Universe,  and  Some  Problems 

of  Philosophy. 

Joachim,  H.  H.,  The  Ethics  of  Spinoza. 

*  Leighton,  J.  A.,  Man  and  the  Cosmos,  Chapters  XII-XVII  and 

XXXV-XXXIX. 

McTaggart,  J.  M.  E.,  Studies  in  Hegelian  Cosmology,  and 
Some  Dogmas  of  Religion. 

Pringle-Pattison,  A.  Seth,  The  Idea  of  God. 

Richardson,  C.  A.,  Spiritual  Pluralism  and  Recent  Philosophy. 

*  Royce,  The  World  ayid  the  Individual,  Vol.  I,  Lectures  VIII, 

IX,  and  X,  Vol.  II,  from  Lecture  VI. 

For  Royce’s  later  view,  The  Problem  of  Christianity. 

Royce  and  Others,  The  Conception  of  God. 

*  Schiller,  F.  C.  S.,  Riddles  of  the  Sphinx,  Chapter  X. 

Sorley,  W.  R.,  Moral  Values  and  the  Idea  of  God. 

*  Spinoza,  Ethics  (translated  by  White,  or  Elwes,  especially 

Books  I  and  V. 

*  Taylor,  A.  E.,  Elements  of  Metaphysics,  Book  II,  Chapter  III, 

and  article  Theism,  in  Encyclopcedia  of  Religion  and  Ethics, 
XII. 

Varisco,  B.,  The  Great  Problems. 

*  Ward,  James,  The  Realm  of  Ends. 


CHAPTER  XXY 


THE  SELF 

I.  The  Nature  of  the  Self 

The  problem  of  the  nature  and  place  of  the  self  is  of 
quite  central  importance  in  modern  philosophy.  In  this 
respect  there  is  a  decided  contrast  between  ancient  and 
modern  philosophy.  It  is  true  that  the  doctrine  of  the 
soul  plays  a  very  important  part  in  the  philosophy  of 
Plato,  and  that  Aristotle’s  conception  of  the  real  as  en- 
telechy  or  individual  is  derived  from  the  notion  of  the 
soul.  But  in  Greek  philosophy  we  miss  the  acute  sense 
of  the  subjectivity,  the  privacy,  and  uniqueness  of  the 
self,  the  feeling  of  the  poignancy  of  experience  as  personal 
and,  consequently,  that  consciousness  of  the  existence  and 
difficulty  of  such  problems  as  how  the  self  knows  the  ex¬ 
ternal  world  or  how  one  self  knows  another.  The  note 
of  subjectivity,  the  feeling  of  and  for  'personality ,  per¬ 
vades  the  greater  part  of  modern  philosophy  and  literature, 
and  is  chiefly  the  result  of  the  Christian  emphasis  on  the 
seriousness  and  worth  of  the  soul,  or  the  inwardness  of  the 
true  life,  reacting  upon  peoples  whose  whole  civilization,  as 
perhaps  their  original  native  bent,  has  tended  to  foster  a 
keen  sense  of  individuality.  Thus  at  the  very  outset  of 
modern  philosophy  we  find  Descartes,  amidst  universal 
doubt,  clearly  conscious  of  his  existence  as  a  thinking 
being.*  1  Locke  believes  in  a  soul  substance,  although  he 

1  He  says,  “I  can  doubt  the  existence  of  everything  else  of  which 

I  have  an  idea,  but  I  cannot  doubt  that  I  exist  as  a  thinking 

434 


THE  SELF 


435 


admits  it  is  only  a  hypothesis  and  that  we  cannot  know 
the  nature  of  this  substance.  But  he  is  certain  that  we 
have  empirical  consciousness  of  our  own  personal  identity. 
Berkeley  is  equally  certain  that  we  can  have  a  notion  or 
intuitive  consciousness  of  the  self  as  the  unitary  spirit 
which  thinks,  perceives,  and  wills.  Kant  makes  the  syn¬ 
thetic  or  organizing  activity  of  the  self  (or  ego)  the  agency 
by  which  the  disjointed  sequences  of  our  sensations  are 
formed  into  knowledge  of  nature  as  a  rational  whole  or 
ordered  world.  According  to  Kant,  we  do  not  perceive  the 
true  self,  but  the  “I  think”  accompanies  all  knowledge, 
and  we  may  become  conscious  of  it  when  we  will.  The  self, 
as  the  organizing  principle  of  knowledge  in  Kant’s  system 
is  universal — the  same  in  all  men,  since  it  is  simply  the 
power  of  intellectual  synthesis.  But  the  self  is  individual¬ 
ized  in  the  fulfillment  of  one’s  moral  vocation.  The  self 
as  purely  moral  will,  subjecting  itself  to  the  commands  of 
duty,  is  the  real  individual.  Kant’s  disciple,  Fichte,  builds 
his  whole  metaphysical  system  of  ethical  or  spiritual  ideal¬ 
ism  on  the  intuition  of  free  self-activity  in  the  individual’s 
moral  wfill.  The  existence  of  other  selves  and  a  world  of 
nature  are  deduced  as  necessary  to  the  fulfillment  of  one’s 
moral  vocation.  Hegel  makes  selfhood  or  spirit  the  key 
to  the  structure  and  meaning  of  the  world,  although  it  is 
doubtful  whether  he  regarded  the  absolute  as  a  self-con¬ 
scious  individual.  More  recent  idealists,  such  as  Bradley 
and  Royce,  make  the  self  or  individual  center  of  experi¬ 
ence  the  clue  to  the  nature  of  reality.  Royce  especially 
emphasizes  the  volitional  character  of  the  self. 

One  great  iconoclast,  David  Hume,  challenged  the 


being;  for  doubting  is  thinking  (cogito,  ergo  sum).”  Herein 
Descartes  repeats  the  thought  of  St.  Augustine  (-{-  430),  the  most 
influential  thinker  of  the  Christian  middle  ages.  The  latter’s 
start  from  the  luminous  self-certainty  of  his  own  existence  as  a 
conscious  being  is  an  expression  of  the  central  place  which  the 
Christian  religion  gave  to  the  human  soul  or  spiritual  personality. 


436 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


grounds  of  belief  in  a  single  or  unitary  and  permanent 
self  in  a  classical  passage,  in  which  he  asserted  that  he 
could  find  no  self  when  he  looked  within  himself,  only 
particular  impressions,  ideas,  and  feelings  in  perpetual 
flux  and  movement.2  The  modern  phenomenalistic  ideal¬ 
ists,  such  as  Mach  and  Pearson,  take  the  same  position. 
As  for  psychology,  William  James  argued  that  the  only 
self  which  psychology  knows  or  needs  is  the  momentary 
“unity  of  the  passing  thought.’ ’ 3  Nearly  all  psychologists 
would  agree  with  him.  Some,  such  as  M.  W.  Calkins, 
contend  that  we  have  an  immediate  feeling  of  selfhood, 
and  therefore  the  self  is  the  most  real  thing  we  know. 

But  the  self  which  I  feel  immediately  is  not  identical 
with  the  self  which  is  held,  by  the  man  in  the  street  and 
by  many  philosophers,  to  exist  as  a  substantial  reality. 
For  (1)  in  the  first  place,  when  I  am  self-conscious,  that 
aspect  of  myself  which  is  conscious  cannot  be  identical  with 
the  aspect  of  my  supposed  self  concerning  which  I  am 
conscious.  The  contents  or  data  of  self-consciousness  are 
ever  fluctuating,  though  not  so  much  as  the  data  of  our 
consciousness  of  the  world.  (2)  At  any  moment  I  may, 
it  is  true,  be  conscious  of  the  unity  of  my  thought,  but 
what  I  mean,  when  I  say  that  I  believe  in  the  self  as  a 
single  and  enduring  reality,  is  that  there  is  a  permanent, 
intelligent,  and  purposive  principle  of  action  which  is  my 
real  self.  (3)  What  I  regard  as  the  center  or  core  of  my 
selfhood  varies  from  time  to  time  and  is  largely  dependent 
on  the  influence  of  my  social,  and  even  my  physical,  en¬ 
vironment.  I  am  a  quite  different  person,  cold  or  warm, 
hungry  or  satiated,  happy  or  miserable,  successful  or  fail¬ 
ing,  popular  or  disliked,  wealthy  or  poor,  playing  or  work¬ 
ing.  As  my  bodily  condition  alters  so  my  conscious  and 
active  selfhood  alters,  and  my  bodily  condition  depends  in 


2  Hume,  Treatise  of  Human  Nature,  Bk.  1,  part  4,  Sects.  5,  6. 

3  James,  Principles  of  Psychology ,  Yol.  I,  Chapter  10. 


THE  SELF 


437 


large  part  on  the  physical  environment.  As  my  social 
atmosphere  alters,  my  self  suffers  alteration  too.  If  the  self 
be  not  wholly  a  product  of  physical  and  social  influences, 
it  is,  at  least,  notoriously  subject  to  alterations  at  the  hand 
of  these  factors.  (4)  The  actual  self  is  clearly  a  changing 
complex  of  experiences — of  perceptions,  wants,  feelings 
(emotions  and  sentiments),  strivings,  purposes,  ideas,  sat¬ 
isfactions,  and  dissatisfactions.  The  complexity  and  in¬ 
stability  of  the  actual  self  is  signally  evidenced  by  the 
many  striking  cases,  which  have  been  written  up  in  recent 
years,  of  multiple  personalities.  Two  or  more  different 
“  persons  ”  or  characters  may  control  the  same  living  body 
in  successive  periods,  longer  or  shorter,  or  in  alternating 
periods.  Even  different  characters  or  complexes  of  feel¬ 
ings  and  strivings  may  struggle  simultaneously  for  the 
control  of  the  body.  A  4 ‘personality”  may  disintegrate. 
An  individual  may  suffer  loss  of  his  normal  or  average 
selfhood  and  become  quite  different ;  he  may  permanently 
recover  his  former  selfhood  or  he  may  oscillate  back  and 
forth  between  the  old  and  the  new.  Logically,  we  should 
not  even  speak  of  “he”  or  “she”  in  such  cases,  for  “he” 
cannot  recover  himself  from  a  state  that  was  not  “he” 
at  all.  (5)  We  are  discussing  the  consciousness  or  experi¬ 
ence  of  selfhood,  but,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  at  any  moment, 
by  far  the  greater  part  of  one ’s  personality  as  it  is  believed 
to  exist,  by  one’s  self,  one’s  friends  and  associates,  is  not 
in  consciousness  at  all.  At  the  present  passing  moment, 
all  that  is  in  my  consciousness  clearly  is  what  I  am  writing 
and,  more  dimly,  the  skill  and  tools  with  which  I  am  doing 
the  writing.  All  my  other  accomplishments  and  defects 
are  out  of  consciousness.  Where  are  these  ?  Is  my  self¬ 
hood  chiefly  an  unconscious  substance  or  enduring  com¬ 
plex  of  physical  powers  or  dispositions,  or  is  it  a  mass 
of  brain  paths  or  engramms  in  the  central  nervous  system  ? 

Much  fresh  light  has  been  shed  on  the  nature  of  the  self 


438 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


by  recent  investigations  of  the  disorders  of  personality; 
such  as,  lapse  of  the  consciousness  of  personal  identity, 
the  struggle  between  alternating  and  conflicting  characters 
for  control  of  the  organism,  mental  obsessions  and  conflicts 
which  may  result  in  nervous  and  mental  breakdown,  and, 
finally,  in  the  field  of  psychical  research,  so-called  (telepathy, 
telaesthesis,  telekinesis,  and  communications  from  the  dead). 
The  last  field  is  large  and  confusing,  and,  it  seems  to  me, 
no  definite  results  have  been  reached  in  it,  except  that  it  is 
a  fruitful  area  for  fraud,  self -illusion,  charlatanry  and 
superstition. 

I  have  space  here  only  to  summarize  the  results  of 
the  recent  work  on  disorders  of  personality.4  The  data 
show:  (1)  That  the  empirical  self  is  an  imperfect  and 
growing  organization  or  synthesis  of  many  complexes  or 
clusters  of  impulsions,  cravings,  memories,  ideas,  and  aims. 
Every  self  is  very  complex.  Every  main  set  of  ideas,  in¬ 
terests,  and  habits  may  be  regarded  as  a  specific  complex; 
and  the  whole  self  is  the  sum  or  combination  of  these 
specific  complexes.  Disintegration  or  disorganization  re¬ 
sults  from  the  persistent  conflict  of  these  constituent  com¬ 
plexes  or  clusters.  Progressive  organization  results  from 
their  successful  synthesis  under  the  control  of  a  life  plan 
or  harmonious  system  of  purposes.  The  achievement  of 
this  synthesis  is  often  blocked  by  the  hidden  conflict  (that 
is,  hidden  from  clear  consciousness)  between  individually 
acknowledged,  and  socially  accepted,  purposes  and  stand¬ 
ards  of  conduct,  and  subconsciously  working  cravings  that 
are  thwarted  by  the  acknowledged  standards.  Thwarted 
sexual  impulsions  are  the  most  frequently  occurring  of 
these  cravings,  but  other  blocked  cravings,  such  as  ambi- 

*  The  best  books  in  this  field  are  probably,  Morton  Prince,  The 
Dissociation  of  a  Personality ,  and  The  Unconscious ;  Sidis  and 
Goodheart,  Multiple  Personality ;  Sigmund  Freud,  The  Mechan¬ 
ism  and  Interpretation  of  Dreams  and  The  Psychopathology  of 
Every-Day  Life ;  C.  G.  Jung,  Psychology  of  the  Unconscious. 


TIIE  SELF 


439 


tion  or  creative  impulse,  may  have  the  same  effect.  (2)  The 
unconscious  parts  of  man’s  affective  and  appetitive  life — 
his  not  consciously  acknowledged  instincts,  impulses,  de¬ 
sires,  old  habits,  forgotten  conflicts,  fears,  and  longings 
— play  a  large  part  in  determining  the  total  character 
and  bent  of  his  personality.  The  study  of  disorders  of 
personality  emphasizes  what  is  often  overlooked  in  the 
study  of  normal  selfhood,  namely,  that,  interwoven  with 
our  clearly  conscious  life,  is  a  great  mass  of  unconscious 
psychical  dispositions,  or  impulsions.  Some  of  these  are  the 
unchanged  natural  heritage  of  man  from  his  biological  an¬ 
cestry.  Others  are  the  results  of  social  perversion.  Still 
others  are  the  acquired  or  achieved  results  of  normal  and 
beneficent  activity  and  training  in  the  past.  A  vigorous, 
healthy,  and  progressing  personality  is  possible  only 
through  the  integration  of  all  man’s  psychical  disposi¬ 
tions  or  soul  elements.  To  achieve  this  integration  is  the 
most  difficult  and  important  task  of  human  life.  All  eco¬ 
nomic  and  social  institutions,  including  education,  religion, 
and  art,  should  be  directed  to  this  end.  The  economic 
order,  and  even  moral  customs,  and  education,  instead 
of  ministering  to  this  supreme  end  of  human  life  and  the 
evolutionary  process,  may  actually  thwart  and  distort  it 
in  many  selves.  “Is  not  the  body  more  than  raiment, 
and  the  life  more  than  meat?”  “What  shall  a  man  give 
in  exchange  for  his  soul?” 

All  parts  away  for  the  progress  of  souls, 

All  religion,  all  solid  things,  arts,  governments — all  that  was  or 
is  apparent  upon  this  globe  or  any  globe,  falls  into  niches 
and  corners  before  the  procession  of  souls  along  the  grand 
roads  of  the  universe. 

Of  the  progress  of  the  souls  of  men  and  women  along  the  grand 
roads  of  the  universe,  all  other  progress  is  the  needed  em¬ 
blem  and  sustenance.  (Song  of  the  Open  Road.) 


440 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


I  swear  I  begin  to  see  the  meaning  of  these  things, 

It  is  not  the  earth,  it  is  not  America  who  is  so  great, 

It  is  I  who  am  great  or  to  be  great,  it  is  You  up  there,  or  any  one, 
It  is  to  walk  rapidly  through  civilizations,  governments,  theories 
Through  poems,  pageants,  shows,  to  form  individuals. 
Underneath  all,  individuals, 

I  swear  nothing  is  good  to  me  now  that  ignores  individuals, 

The  American  compact  is  altogether  with  individuals, 

The  only  government  is  that  which  makes  minute  of  individuals, 
The  whole  theory  of  the  universe  is  directed  unerringly  to  one 
single  individual — namely  to  You.  (By  Blue  Ontario’s 
Shore.) 

“And  I  will  not  make  a  poem,  or  the  least  part  of  a  poem  but  has 
reference  to  the  soul, 

Because  having  looked  at  the  objects  of  the  universe,  I  find  there 
is  no  one  nor  any  particle  of  one  but  has  reference  to  the 
soul.”  (Starting  from  Paumonok.) 

I  might  have  culled,  from  Leaves  of  Grass ,  dozens  of 
such  passages.  For  the  dominant  and  ever  recurrent  theme 
of  Walt  Whitman,  the  bard  of  democratic  individuality 
and  comradeship,  is  that  the  whole  meaning  and  purport 
of  the  cosmical  and  the  social  process  is  the  unending  prog¬ 
ress  of  the  self  or  soul.  If  he  is  wrong  there  is  no  mean¬ 
ing  in  the  universe,  and  it  is  but  an  insane  jest.  Certainly 
human  beings  are  fools  and  blind,  in  so  far  as  they  do  not 
straightway  make  all  institutions,  customs,  and  laws  sub¬ 
servient  to  the  universal  perfecting  and  fruition  of  human 
individuality,  of  selfhood  throughout  the  round  world. 
As  Keats  said,  this  world  is  a  “vale  of  soul-making.” 

The  self  is  not  simple  or  unchanging.  Plato’s  doctrine 
of  the  soul  will  not  hold  in  the  face  of  the  facts.  The 
self,  whatever  it  may  be,  is  certainly  largely  the  product 
of  its  surroundings,  unstable  and  dependent.  And  yet 
we  do  inexpugnably  feel  in  our  best  moments  the  reality 
of  our  individualities.  We  feel  ourselves  to  be  responsible 
agents,  and  society  treats  us  as  such,  in  education,  social, 


THE  SELF 


441 


and  business  intercourse  and  law.  We  feel  ourselves  to 
have  enduring  natures  which  are  expressed  in  the  purposes 
which  we  pursue  and  cling  to,  even  amidst  seeming  ship¬ 
wreck  of  all  our  hopes  and  plans.  The  stronger  among  us 
persist  in  being  true  to  ourselves,  in  pursuing  our  chosen 
aims  and  ambitions,  in  serving  our  elected  ideals  of  life. 
And  society,  almost  by  instinct,  recognizes  and  respects, 
even  worships,  the  strong  and  self-reliant  individual.  It 
turns  to  him  in  its  days  of  perplexity  and  distress.  The 
history  of  human  progress  is  chiefly  the  story  of  the  creative 
beginnings  made  by  great  individuals  in  all  directions. 
Knowledge,  discovery,  invention,  industry,  polities,  educa¬ 
tion,  art,  and  even  religion,  are  modified,  reconstructed, 
added  to,  propelled  by  the  creative,  exploring,  and  organ¬ 
izing  individuals. 

Must  we  conclude  that  selfhood  is  complex  and  yet  a 
unity,  ever  changing  and  yet  permanent,  passively  moulded 
and  yet  truly  self -creative  and  creative  of  other  existences 
and  values,  a  partially  unorganized  mass  of  cravings  and 
experiences  and  yet  an  active  organizing  principle,  the 
creature  of  its  environment  and  yet  the  recreator  of  envi¬ 
ronments,  the  product  of  the  universe,  and  yet  the  best 
clue  to  the  meaning  and  purpose  of  the  universal  order? 
Yes,  I  think  we  must  answer  these  paradoxical  queries  in 
the  affirmative. 

The  self  is  subject  and  object.  It  feels  itself  to  be  “I,” 
and  yet  the  “I”  is  vastly  more  than  the  self  at  any  instant 
feels  itself  to  be.  “I”  and  “thou”  have  meaning  only 
because  there  is  a  feeling  of  selfhood,  but  this  immediate 
sense  of  selfhood  is  but  the  starting  point  upon  which  is 
built  the  notion  of  selfhood  or  individuality .  The  latter  is 
a  construction  of  thought,  but  we  have  the  best  right  in  the 
world  to  believe  that  it  is  a  valid  construction. 

For,  (1)  the  critic,  who  sets  out  to  refute  the  legitimacy 
of  a  belief  in  individuality,  contradicts  himself  both  in 


442 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


setting  out  at  all  and  in  every  step  he  takes.  He  assumes 
the  existence  of  other  selves  and  himself  and  then  proceeds, 
in  terms  of  “I”  and  “you”  and  “they,”  to  refute  the 
reality  of  the  self.  (2)  The  self  is  indeed  complex  and 
growing.  For  selfhood  or  individuality  is  the  progressive 
organization  of  the  native  capacities  of  a  conscious  organism 
into  a  more  harmonious  and  richer  unity  of  experience  and 
deed.  The  actual  self  is  a  self -organizing  principle.  The 
materials  of  individuality  are  the  inborn  impulses  of  the 
organism.  The  patterns  for  the  work  to  be  done  are  the 
social  types  of  conduct,  thought,  sentiment,  character,  and 
trained  capacity,  which  have  been  worked  out  by  other 
socially  creative  selves  in  the  history  of  human  culture. 
The  ultimate  agent  in  the  process  of  self-development  or 
creation  is  the  attentively  selective,  valuing,  purposing,  or¬ 
ganizing  mind  of  the  individual.  The  more  truly  the 
natural  self  becomes  a  spiritual  individual  or  personality, 
the  more  socialized  and  rational,  the  more  self-dependent 
and  creative  it  becomes.  Thus  the  individual  grows  more 
and  more  into  a  self-determining,  self-initiating  unity.  He 
ceases  to  be  the  mere  creature  of  his  environment,  and 
becomes  in  some  part  the  transformer,  the  renewer  and 
recreator  of  the  physical  and  social  environments.  Instinc¬ 
tive  cravings  and  imperious  desires  become  transformed 
into  dynamic  factors  in  the  organized  and  harmonious  life 
of  the  whole  self.  The  nature  of  the  self  is  thus  revealed 
as  it  is  “  realized  ”  or  “  actualized  ’ 9  in  the  fundamental  and 
increasingly  systematic  development  of  its  active  attitudes, 
its  valuations,  choices,  persistent  purposes  and  deeds.  The 
self  is  thus  not  a  mere  “phenomenal”  flux  or  stream  of 
passively  determined  feelings  and  ideas.  It  is  not,  on  the 
other  hand,  an  unchanging  “substance 9  ’  or  entity  unaffected 
by  its  aims,  history,  and  environment.  Selfhood  or  indi¬ 
viduality  has  many  degrees.  It  is  a  complex,  dynamic 
process  always  having  some  degree  of  unity  in  thought, 


THE  SELF 


443 


feeling,  and  purpose;  and  is  capable  of  developing  more 
unity  and  harmony  under  appropriate  conditions. 

(3)  The  self  is  the  product  of  the  universe  and  the  best 
clue  to  the  nature  of  the  whole.  For  the  notions  of  sub¬ 
stance  or  permanence  through  change ,  of  unity  in  multi¬ 
plicity ,  of  organization  or  systematic  relation  in  a  whole, 
of  uniformity ,  intelligibility ,  coherence,  of  a  purposive 
order  and  of  individuality — in  short,  all  the  fundamental 
notions,  which  man  employs  in  the  work  of  understanding 
and  controlling  nature,  and  so  harmonizing  himself  with 
nature,  by  intelligent  apprehension  and  rational  mastery, 
are  derived  from  the  life  of  human  society.  Selfhood  has 
as  its  original  datum,  its  core,  the  inborn  capacities  and 
the  dynamic  principle  of  mental  organization.  But  the 
full  selfhood  of  the  rational  individual  arises  only  in  a 
highly  developed  social  order.  Every  principle  and  instru¬ 
ment  of  thought  which  man  employs  in  interpreting  the 
world  is  a  product  of  social  experience.  Uniformity ,  law, 
order,  finality — these  are  social  categories.  This  does  not 
mean  that  nature  as  an  intelligible  order  is  created  out 
of  nothing  by  social  effort.  It  does  carry  the  implication 
that,  since  the  intellectual  tools  by  which  man  succeeds  in 
understanding  and  controlling  nature  are  of  social  origin, 
there  must  be  a  fundamental  correspondence,  or  harmony, 
or  organic  interdependence  of  structure  between  nature  and 
human  nature.  Kant  said  “the  understanding  makes 
nature.”  I  would  say  “the  social  understanding  and  will 
make  nature,  because  society  is  the  highest  product  and 
value  achieved  in  nature.” 

(4)  The  pathological  disintegration  of  actual  selves  does 
not  mean  the  absolute  disintegration  of  the  self.  In  all 
these  cases  there  is  still  a  unity  of  selfhood.  It  is  obscured 
and  thwarted  by  nervous  disintegration.  The  various  selves 
or  “persons”  in  such  cases  are  not  true  selves  or  persons. 
They  are  relatively  isolated  clusters  of  impulses  and  ideas 


444 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


in  an  individual  who  has  not  achieved  the  integration  of  a 
full  selfhood.  Actual  selfhood  has  all  manner  of  degrees  of 
organization  of  the  congenital  impulses  to  action. 

(5)  A  considerable  part  of  the  life  of  selfhood  is  at  any 
moment  unconscious.  Individuality  includes  much  more 
than  is  in  consciousness.  It  is  an  organized  whole  of  many 
capacities.  The  questions  involved  in  the  relation  of  the 
conscious,  the  subconscious  and  the  unconscious  in  mental 
life  are  too  complex  to  be  discussed  here.  I  must  leave 
this  matter  with  the  warning  that  the  admission  of  an 
unconscious  psychical  life  by  no  means  commits  one  to  the 
recognition  of  a  distinct  subconscious  self.  The  latter  is  a 
bit  of  mythology. 

Since  we  have  already  found  grounds  for  rejecting 
materialism,  we  hold  that  the  self  is  not  identical  with  the 
nervous  system.  The  mental  self  is,  we  have  seen,  inti¬ 
mately  bound  up  with  the  central  nervous  system.  The 
latter  is  the  instrument  by  means  of  which  the  self  affects 
and  is  affected  by  the  world.  The  mind  is  a  power  or  system 
of  powers,  of  memory,  inhibition,  selection,  generalization, 
valuation,  and  choice,  by  which  the  nervous  responses  are 
organized  and  made  subservient  to  the  enrichment,  intensi¬ 
fication,  harmonization,  and  conservation  of  the  conscious 
life  of  the  organism. 

We  will  now  review  briefly  the  chief  theories  of  the  self. 
These  are  five  in  number:  (1)  Animism  or  the  doctrine  of 
a  soul-substance ,  entirely  different  and  separable  from  the 
body ,  but  interacting  with  it.  This  conception  of  the  soul 
developed  out  of  the  early  conception  of  the  soul  as  a 
finer  body.  It  is  the  form  in  which  the  notion  of  the 
immateriality  of  the  soul  emerges,  particularly  in  Hebrew 
and  Greek  thought  in  the  days  of  their  maturity.  In  their 
immature  phases  both  Hebrew  and  Greek  thought  conceived 
the  soul  to  be  simply  the  vital  principle ,  which  animates  and 
directs  the  body ;  in  this  respect  Greek  and  Hebrew  thought 


THE  SELF 


445 


did  not  differ  from  that  of  early  thought  among  other 
peoples.  In  Plato,  who  seems  to  have  been  the  first  thinker 
to  conceive  the  soul  as  an  absolutely  immaterial  principle, 
we  find  the  beginnings  of  the  tripartite  conception  of  man. 
The  Psyche  or  soul  is  the  principle  of  the  physical  life,  the 
Nous,  reason  or  spirit,  is  the  seat  of  the  moral  and  intellec¬ 
tual  life  and,  thus,  the  organ  of  the  ideas ;  thus,  in  Plato, 
man  is  regarded  as  being  composed  of  a  union  of  body,  soul 
and  reason  or  spirit.  St.  Paul,  like  Plato,  conceives  man  to 
be  composed  of  body,  soul,  and  spirit.  This  tripartite 
conception  became  the  orthodox  Christian  conception.  This 
Triadism,  or  Trialisyn,  as  it  is  sometimes  called,  is  to  be 
found,  confusedly  intermingled  wih  Dualism,  running 
through  the  history  of  Christian  thought.  Descartes  aban¬ 
dons  it,  by  eliminating  the  soul  as  the  principle  of  natural 
life.  He  regards  the  living  body  as  a  machine  and  identifies 
the  soul  with  the  rational  and  spiritual  principle.  Locke 
and  Kant  follow  him  in  this  respect.  The  doctrine  of 
Animism  has  had  vigorous  defenders  in  recent  times.5  The 
doctrine  of  Vitalism  in  biology  is  closely  akin  to,  indeed  is  a 
form  of,  the  two  substances  or  animistic  theory. 

The  difficulties  in  the  way  of  accepting  this  theory  have 
already  been  discussed.  The  chief  are  these — the  soul  is 
neither  unchangeable  nor  independent  of  the  body ;  animism 
finds  it  very  hard  to  state  how  soul  and  body  can  interact 
if  they  are  diametrically  opposite  in  character ;  and,  finally, 
if  the  soul  be  affirmed  to  be  independent  and  unchangeable, 
no  intelligible  notion  can  be  framed  as  to  the  relation  be¬ 
tween  this  mysterious  substance  and  the  actual  self  of 
experience. 

The  doctrine  of  Triadism  carries  us  beyond  dualism  to  a 


s  Prominent  among  these  is  Dr.  William  MacDougall  in  his 
Body  and  Mind.  Among  biological  vitalists  may  be  mentioned 
Professors  Hans  Driesch,  Henri  Bergson,  J.  A.  Thomson,  and  J.  S. 
Haldane. 


446 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


conception  of  levels  or  stages  of  being  that  transcends 
dualism.  This  conception  has  already  been  outlined  in 
Chapter  XIX.  (See  also  paragraph  5  below.) 

2.  Materialism  affirms  that  the  soul  is  simply  a  by¬ 
product  of  the  body.  Therefore  the  real  or  efficient  self 
is  the  bodily  self.  We  need  not  repeat  the  results  of  the 
critical  examination  of  this  theory  already  made  in  Chap¬ 
ter  XVI. 

3.  Spiritualism  or  idealism  affirms  that  only  psychical 
or  conscious  selves  are  realities.*  It  would  be  less  mis¬ 
leading,  in  view  of  the  several  meanings  which  the  term 
idealism  has  borne,  to  call  this  view  psychism  or  mentalism. 
It  fails  to  explain  why  bodies  should  appear  to  exist  and 
to  behave  in  a  manner  different  from  minds,  if  all  bodies 
are  nothing  other  than  thoughts  or  volitions  of  minds.  It 
must  hold  that,  when  an  apparent  body  either  helps  or 
hinders  the  working  of  a  mind,  it  is  never  anything  but 
a  case  of  one  thought  or  volition  helping  or  hindering  an¬ 
other  thought  or  volition. 

4.  Psychophysical  parallelism.  This  doctrine  has  al¬ 
ready  been  stated  and  examined  in  Chapter  XIX. 

5.  The  self  is  a  psychophysical  individuality,  poten¬ 
tially  rational  and  spiritual.  It  consists  of  an  organic 
union  of  several  levels  or  stages  of  being — physical,  vital, 
and  sentient,  and  rational  or  spiritual.  Body  is  a  genuine 
and  essential  condition  of  individuality  or  selfhood.  I 
am  unable  to  conceive  a  spiritual  individual  existing  with¬ 
out  bodily  form  or  powers.  1  have  never  found,  in  the 
history  of  thought,  a  coherent  and  intelligible  conception 
of  this  sort.  I  venture  to  say  that  no  such  conception  can 
be  framed  by  a  human  being.  On  the  other  hand,  the  facts 
seem  to  me  to  negative  the  assumption  that  living  and  sen¬ 
tient  bodies  do  not  differ  in  character  from  nonliving 
bodies.  Furthermore,  the  facts  of  human  nature,  as 
manifested  in  the  products  of  culture  and  in  the  social 


THE  SELF 


447 


order,  seem  to  me  equally  to  sustain  the  view  that  there 
is,  in  man,  a  third  power — one  which ,  with  regard  to  the 
chief  phases  and  results  of  its  operations,  may  he  called 
reason,  creative  imagination,  and  moral  consciousness. 
This  power  is  one,  although  its  manifestations  are  diverse. 
Like  the  other  powers  of  the  self  it  may  be  thwarted  or 
perverted.  It  does  not  exist  in  like  degree  in  all  selves. 
But  it  is,  none  the  less,  a  dynamic  reality.  No  one  of 
these  powers,  which,  in  organic  and  harmonious  interplay, 
make  up  the  self,  is  absolutely  independent  of  the  other 
two.  Sentient  life  involves  a  specific  type  of  material  or¬ 
ganization.  The  functioning  of  the  reason  or  spirit  in¬ 
volves,  and  is  built  up  on,  the  sentient  powers  of  the  self. 
The  body  is  a  dynamic  organization.  The  sentient  soul, 
through  perception  and  feeling,  supplies  basic  data  of  the 
relations  between  the  self  and  its  world.  The  rational  and 
spiritual  principle,  starting  from  these  data,  interprets, 
evaluates,  selects,  devises,  and  wills.  The  spiritual  prin¬ 
ciple  is  the  idea,  in  the  Platonic  sense,  of  the  body,  or  in 
Aristotle’s  terms  it  is  the  entelechy  or  end-realizing  power. 
The  meaning  and  value  of  the  bodily  and  sentient  life  is 
realized,  by  being  concentered,  evaluated  and  redirected,  in 
the  rational  life  of  the  higher  selfhood.  Thus  the  soul  is 
never  mere  soul  nor  the  body  mere  body.  Taking  the  word 
soul  as  the  popular  equivalent  for  the  sentient  and  the 
rational  principles  together,  we  may  say  that  states  of  soul 
plus  states  of  body  produce  other  states  of  body  plus  other 
states  of  soul.  Negatively  put,  a  state  of  either  soul  or 
body  is  never  the  product  merely  of  another  state  of  soul 
or  body.  The  interaction  is  a  multiplex  process  within 
one  organic  individuality.  It  is  that  of  reciprocating  ele¬ 
ments  in  one  living  system. 

In  regard  to  the  mental  self,  there  is  another  matter  of 
controversy  to  be  considered.  Which  is  more  fundamental 
in  the  soul  or  mind,  intellect  or  will,  thought  or  feeling  and 


•  448 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


conation t  The  intellect  ualists  make  intellect  fundamental 
and  the  voluntarists  make  conation  of  prime  importance. 
Descartes,  Spinoza,  and  Hegel  would  be  classed  as  intellec- 
tualists;  Kant,  Fichte,  and  Schopenhauer,  as  voluntarists. 
Voluntarism  has  been  much  in  fashion  lately  largely  due 
to  the  influence  of  biology.  The  whole  controversy  is  a 
mistaken  one.  In  man  feeling,  striving,  and  thinking  are 
equally  congenital  and  fundamental.  One  can  understand 
why  an  irrationalistic  pessimist  like  Schopenhauer  should 
tie  up  to  an  extreme  voluntarism  because  it  supported  his 
ethical  twist,  but  it  is  difficult  to  understand  wThy  one  who, 
without  prejudice,  studies  carefully  the  facts  of  human 
nature  should  not  see  that,  while  man’s  impulses  and  in¬ 
stincts  are  indeed  ineradicable  and  often  imperious  in  their 
clamancy,  they  are  the  impulses,  the  conations,  of  a  being 
who  is  conscious  of  his  surroundings  and  who  frames 
images  and  concepts  of  his  world  and  acts  by  their  guid¬ 
ance.  Intellect  is  itself  a  kind  of  conation ;  but,  on  the 
other  hand,  distinctively  human  volition  is  voluntary  action 
incited  and  guided  by,  and  culminating  in,  knowledge. 

Probably  the  one-sided  voluntarism  of  the  present  time 
is  the  consequence  of  the  undue  emphasis  on  man’s  biolog¬ 
ical  inheritance  and  the  resulting  failure  to  distinguish 
between  the  character  of  instinct,  impulse,  emotion,  the 
will-to-live  and  the  will-to-power  in  man  and  in  the  animal 
world.  Even  the  will-to-live  and  the  will-to-power  in  their 
most  ruthless,  dangerous,  and  ethically  inhuman  forms  in 
human  society  are  incited  by  ideas  and  guided  to  their 
accomplishment  by  thought. 

II.  Freedom  and  The  Self 

I  close  with  a  few  words  on  the  relation  between  the  con¬ 
cept  of  selfhood  and  freedom.  Freedom  of  the  will  prop¬ 
erly  means  freedom  of  the  self,  and  this  in  turn,  means 


THE  SELF 


449 


self-determination.  The  freedom  that  is  implied  in  our 
conception  of  individuality  is  not  that  of  unmotived  or 
capricious  and  irrational  choice.  Such  a  freedom,  if  pos¬ 
sible,  would  have  no  moral  worth  for  man.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  nature  of  the  self,  as  a  being  that  grows  in  ra¬ 
tional  and  moral  self-determination,  implies  that  the  self 
is  not  absolutely  predetermined  by  its  antecedent  history. 
If  the  self  be  not  the  purely  passive  product  of  circum¬ 
stances,  it  must  have  the  capacity  to  free  itself  from  the 
clutch  of  circumstance  to  the  extent  to  which  such  freedom 
is  involved  in  the  fulfillment  of  its  own  rational  nature. 
What  the  self  wills  at  any  moment  is  determinate,  for  it 
is  the  joint  resultant  of  circumstances  and  that  degree 
and  manner  of  self-expression  of  individuality  of  which 
the  self  is,  at  that  particular  moment,  capable. 

But  it  does  not  follow  that,  in  similar  circumstances,  in 
a  future  crisis,  the  self  must  choose  as  it  did  before.  New 
and  deeper  or  more  rational  aspects  of  the  self’s  individ¬ 
uality  may  come  into  play.  The  truth  is,  it  appears  to  me, 
that  in  the  moral  life  of  man  exactly  the  same  situation 
never  does  twice  occur.  For  at  least  the  self  is  not  the 
same  as  it  was,  and  in  the  infinite  complexity  of  human 
life,  the  conditions  subject  to  which  choices  and  volitions 
are  made  must  also  be  consequently  varying  in  some  de¬ 
gree. 

The  chief  arguments  advanced  for  determinism ,  by 
which  I  understand  the  view  that  human  volitions  are,  like 
all  the  processes  in  the  universe,  the  unequivocal  resultants 
of  antecedent  conditions,  are  as  follows : 

1.  The  universality  of  causation.  Human  action,  it 
is  said  cannot  be  an  exception  to  the  rule  that  every  event 
is  the  perfectly  determinate  result  of  equally  determinate 
antecedents.  To  this  argument  the  advocate  of  rational 
freedom  replies  that  the  final  determining  factor  in  vol¬ 
untary  or  chosen  action  is  just  the  conscious  self  itself, 


450 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


which  weighs,  evaluates,  and  chooses  between  possible  ac¬ 
tions  in  the  light  of  an  ideal  standard. 

2.  The  actual  continuity  of  character  and  conduct. 
The  determinist  points  out  that  the  better  we  know  a  per¬ 
son  the  more  certainly  can  we  predict  how  that  person  will 
act  in  given  conditions.  The  individuality  of  a  person  is 
a  determinate  quantum,  a  so-much.  Moreover,  he  insists 
that  our  whole  work  of  moral  and  intellectual  education 
aims  at  building  up  a  definite  character,  the  type  of  char¬ 
acter  demanded  by  the  structure  and  aims  of  the  social 
order.  He  insists  that  the  very  notion  of  responsibility 
implies  that  the  rational  human  individual  is  a  being  that 
can  be  counted  on  to  act  in  specific  ways  corresponding  to 
specific  situations.  He  explains  the  functions  of  rewards 
and  punishments,  praise  and  blame,  to  be  to  produce  the 
type  of  character  that  the  educator,  the  parent,  the  judge, 
as  the  agents  of  the  social  group,  or  the  group  itself  through 
its  approvals  and  disapprovals,  demands. 

To  these  arguments  the  advocate  of  freedom  replies  as 
follows :  He  does  not  contest  the  fact  of  continuity  in  char¬ 
acter  and  conduct ;  but  holds  that  the  highest  degree  of 
continuity  exists  just  where  the  self  is  most  truly  a  ra¬ 
tional,  self-determining  individual,  who  has  an  ideal  which 
he  follows  and  who  judges  his  own  conduct  in  the  light  of 
that  ideal.  He  argues  that  the  aim  of  all  social  approval 
and  disapproval,  of  all  rewards  and  punishments,  of  all 
social  inhibitions  and  incitements  to  the  self,  should  be 
educative.  But  he  holds  that  true  education  is  education 
into  responsible  self-determination,  that  the  highest  aim 
of  society  should  be  to  give  opportunity  for  human  beings 
to  become  more  rational  individuals,  responsible  to  their 
own  ideals.  He  holds  that  the  highest  type  of  society  is 
that  one  which  contains  the  largest  proportion  of  persons 
who  do  not  passively  accept  the  current  fashions  in  conduct 
and  thought  but  who,  actively  and  in  the  light  of  reflection, 


THE  SELF 


451 


determine  for  themselves  the  right  course  of  conduct.  He 
insists  that,  in  the  case  of  punishment  through  the  law, 
the  offender  should  be  treated  as  a  responsible  being  who 
accepts  the  guilt  as  his  own,  and  who  thus  can  actively 
participate  in  his  own  moral  renovation.  He  argues  that 
the  individual  is  not  to  be  treated  by  society  as  an  animal 
capable  of  being  trained  to  do  its  tricks.  He  argues  that 
the  highest  type  of  human  being  is  precisely  one  who  feels 
keenly  his  own  responsibilities  as  a  self-determining  agent. 
He  argues  further  that  the  possibility  of  self -initiated 
change  is  a  necessary  postulate  of  the  moral  life. 

It  is  evident  that  the  real  question  at  issue  is  this — 
has  the  normal  self  to  any  degree  the  power  of  rational 
self -determination  or  is  it  the  plastic  creature  of  circum¬ 
stances?  If  the  self  be  the  sort  of  reality  whose  charac¬ 
teristics  I  have  sketched,  this  question  may  be  answered 
in  terms  of  the  first  alternative. 

The  meaning  of  this  view  may,  perhaps,  be  illustrated 
by  considering  the  place  of  the  conscious  self  in  relation  to 
the  neural  activities.  The  cerebral  cortex  is  a  very  intri¬ 
cate  system  of  nerve  cells  and  connecting  paths  (neurones 
and  dendrites).  Because  of  its  original  plasticity  new 
connections  are  constantly  being  made  in  it  in  the*  process 
of  the  education  of  the  individual.  The  sensory  and  the 
motor  segments  of  the  nervous  system  constitute,  respec¬ 
tively,  specific  sets  of  native  ivays  of  perceiving  and  re¬ 
sponding  to  stimidi.  Thus,  the  organism  has  native  ways 
of  reacting,  both  directly  to  stimuli  that  originate  in  the 
external  environment,  and  indirectly,  through  the  re¬ 
sponses  motivated  by  the  inborn  and  persistent  needs  of 
the  organism.  In  purely  reflex  action  the  organism  re¬ 
sponds,  fatally,  to  peripheral  stimuli,  that  is  to  stimuli 
arising  from  the  impact  of  physical  and  extra-organic  ener¬ 
gies,  in  fashions  that  have  been  determined  by  the  ances¬ 
tral  struggle  for  existence  of  the  species.  In  centrally 


452 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


initiated  action  of  the  purely  impulsive  or  nondeliberative 
type,  the  organism ’s  activity  is  determined  by  the  inherited 
character  of  its  needs  or  appetites — for  food,  drink, 
warmth,  sex,  shelter,  companionship,  play,  constructive¬ 
ness,  aesthetic  feeling,  intellectual  satisfaction,  social  recog¬ 
nition,  power — which  are  the  resultants  of  biological  and 
social  evolution.  The  function  of  thought  is  to  revalue 
and  organize  these  varied  and  often  conflicting  native 
impulsions  into  a  harmonious,  going  concern  under  the 
guidance,  first,  of  social  patterns  of  conduct,  and,  finally, 
of  a  life  plan  or  system  of  purposes  affirmed  by  the  indi¬ 
vidual.  Without  the  intervention  of  reflective  conscious¬ 
ness,  without  deliberation  and  choice,  the  human  organism 
would  respond  in  specific  and  complex  ways,  determined  in 
part  by  the  character  of  the  external  stimuli  and  in  part 
by  the  character  of  its  own  native  bodily  organization  and 
needs.  The  reactions  of  a  wholly  untrained  and  unthink¬ 
ing  organism  would  be  simply  the  results  of  the  blind  com¬ 
position  of  inherited  action-patterns  with  external  stimuli. 
The  native  ways  of  reacting  to  external  stimuli  and  or¬ 
ganic  cravings  with  sensory  experiences  and  movements 
are  complex  and  modifiable.  It  is  the  plasticity  of  its 
action  patterns  that  makes  the  human  organism  educable 
and  free.  They  may  be  tied  up  together  in  a  variety  of 
ways.  The  tying  up  is  done  in  the  brain. 

What  new  factors  do  conscious  experience,  deliberation, 
valuation,  and  choice  introduce  into  the  organism’s  reac¬ 
tions  ;  in  other  words,  what  is  the  function  of  the  conscious 
self  ?  It  delays  responses.  It  builds  up,  in  its  system  of 
ideas  and  purposes,  a  selective  mechanism  which  shifts  the 
emphasis,  by  attention  and  choice,  on  what  shall  be  per¬ 
ceived  and  done.  It  generalizes  from  the  perceptual  and 
memory  materials  which  constitute  “experience.”  It 
weighs  and  evaluates  the  results  of  possible  actions.  It 
forms,  in  short,  a  moving  system  of  selective  interests  or 


THE  SELF 


453 


aims,  which  originate  in  its  own  affectively  colored  judg¬ 
ments  of  value,  as  to  what  is  most  worth  noting,  remem¬ 
bering,  seeking  to  avoid,  to  attain,  and  to  retain  in  its 
experiences.  Delayed  response  is  the  condition  of  delib¬ 
eration  and  choice.6  But  the  latter  involves,  further,  a 
“throwing  of  the  switches”  in  the  cortex,  a  “loading  of 
the  dice,”  motivated  by  the  organization  of  interests,  the 
systematization  of  values  in  perception  and  action,  which 
is  performed  by  conscious  selfhood ;  which  indeed  consti¬ 
tutes  the  very  essence  of  selfhood.  For,  at  its  highest 
level,  conscious  individuality  is  an  organization  of  attitudes 
or  dispositions  to  act,  to  know  and  to  feel,  guided  by  re¬ 
flection  upon  the  values  yielded  by  the  various  types  of 
sensory  and  motor  reactions  which  it  has  had  in  the  past 
and  may  have  in  the  present  and  future  physical  and 
social  environments. 

In  brief,  the  human  self  is  educable;  and  true  education 
consists  in  the  gradual  development,  through  the  training 
of  its  plastic  innate  powers,  by  bringing  to  bear  on  them 
the  race’s  store  of  wisdom,  to  the  point  where  the  self,  hav¬ 
ing  developed  an  ideal  and  scheme  of  life,  can  direct 
thoughtfully  its  own  impulsions.  The  goal  of  education 
is  the  achievement  of  the  power  of  harmonious,  well-bal¬ 
anced  and  effective  self-direction,  or  individuality,  as  a 
member  of  human  society. 

Rational  freedom  is  nothing  more  than  the  actualization 
of  the  capacity  to  interpret,  evaluate,  and  thus  organize 
into  an  ideal  or  coherent  system  of  purposes  or  values,  the 


6  The  brain  seems  to  function  chiefly  as  a  blocking  or  inhibit¬ 
ing  and  coordinating  mechanism.  Reflexes  and  impulsions,  the 
organism’s  prime  movers,  may  be  inhibited  sufficiently  long,  in 
their  passage  through  the  brain,  to  enable  new  connections  to  be 
made.  Inhibition  and  the  neural  plasticity  which  admits  of  the 
formation  of  fresh  coordinations  between  appetitions  and  acts  are 
the  physiological  conditions  of  purposive  choice  and  volition.  Im¬ 
pairment  of  these  functions  results  in  the  disintegration  of  the 
voluntary  life  and  the  fatal  rule  of  reflex  and  habit  automatisms. 


454 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


experiences  which  the  organism  has  and  takes  note  of. 
But  we  must  not  forget  that,  at  the  center  of  these  voli¬ 
tional  experiences,  are  the  individual’s  own  experience  of 
its  ideal  strivings  and  valuations,  its  demands  for  the  frui¬ 
tion  of  its  yearnings  for  inner  harmony  and  inner  growth, 
for  social  harmony  and  social  progress,  for  comradeship 
and  justice,  for  the  progress  of  great  human  causes;  in 
short,  for  “more  life  and  fuller”  of  the  sort  that  one 
means  when  one  thinks  of  the  fellowship  of  noble  minds, 
endowed  with  sympathy  for  humankind  and  enkindled 
with  the  passion  for  the  increase  and  spread  of  truth, 
beauty,  justice,  and  comradeship,  participation  in  and 
service  of  which  lift  society  and  the  individual  out  of  the 
mire  of  sensualism,  of  selfishness,  of  a  hardened  and  ex¬ 
clusive  egoism,  out  of  that  static  egohood  which  is  the 
death  of  the  soul. 

It  is  the  mission  of  philosophy  to  judge  the  possibilities 
of  man  in  the  light  of  the  highest  that  man  has  lived  and 
striven  for.  The  philosopher  who  does  not  think  nobly  of 
the  soul  is  no  genuine  philosopher.  For,  in  a  complex  and 
changing  world,  an  interpretation  of  its  central  factor 
which  would  read  the  meaning  and  destiny  of  the  whole 
life  of  the  spirit  in  man  in  the  light  of  an  arithmetical  aver¬ 
age  is  untrue  to  the  meaning  of  the  whole.  Not  the  so- 
called  ‘‘divine  average”  but  the  highest  and  rarest  and 
most  excellent  that  has  been  lived  by  men  is  the  key  to 
the  meaning  of  spiritual  individuality,  of  selfhood  or  per¬ 
sonality  in  man. 


References 

*  Avey,  A.  E.,  Readings  in  Philosophy ,  Chapter  XXII. 
Bergson,  H.,  Matter  and  Memory,  and  Time  and  Free  Will. 
Bosanquet,  B.,  The  Principle  of  Individuality  and  Value,  pp. 

68-77  and  the  whole  of  Lecture  IX. 

Bradley,  F.  H.,  Appearance  and  Reality,  Chapters  IX,  X 


THE  SELF 


455 


*  Calkins,  Persistent  Problems  of  Philosophy ,  Chapter  XI,  B.  II, 

Personal  Idealism,  also  Calkins,  A  First  Book  in  Psychology. 

*  Howison,  George  H.,  The  Limits  of  Evolution. 

*  Hume,  Treatise  of  Human  Nature,  Book  1,  pt.  4. 

*  James,  Wm.,  A  Pluralistic  Universe,  passim,  and  Will  to  Be¬ 

lieve  ( The  Dilemma  of  Determinism) . 

Laird,  J.,  Problems  of  the  Self. 

*  Leighton,  J.  A.,  Man  and  the  Cosmos,  Chapters  XXII-XXXIV, 

*  McDougall,  Body  and  Mind. 

McTaggart,  J.  M.  E.,  Art.,  Personality  in  Encyclopedia  of  Re¬ 
ligion  and  Ethics,  and  Studies  in  Hegelian  Cosmology. 

*  Palmer,  G.  H.,  The  Problem  of  Freedom. 

Parker,  Dewitt  H.,  The  Self  and  Nature. 

*  Prince,  Morton,  The  Dissociation  of  a  Personality. 

*  Rashdall,  Hastings,  Personality,  Human  and  Divine;  in  Per¬ 

sonal  Idealism. 

Royce,  J.,  see  index  under  Individuality  in  The  World  and  the 
Individual,  and  The  Problem  of  Christianity. 

Sherrington,  C.  S.,  The  Integrative  Action  of  the  Central  Nerv¬ 
ous  System. 

Ward,  J.,  The  Realm  of  Ends,  see  under  the  Individual  in  Index, 
also  Art.,  Psychology  in  the  Britannica,  11th  ed.,  and  Psy¬ 
chological  Principles. 


CHAPTER  XXVI 


ETHICS  AND  SOCIAL  PHILOSOPHY 

The  central  problem  of  ethics  is  the  determination  of  a 
standard  of  the  good  or  a  rationally  definable  criterion  of 
intrinsic  values,  a  standard  for  voluntary  conduct.  Is 
there  any  common  measure  for  those  ends  that  are  intrin¬ 
sically  good  or  have  value  in  themselves  for  the  human 
agent?  If  so,  what  is  it?  Is  it  a  maximum  of  agreeable 
feeling?  Or  obedience  to  rules  of  reason?  Or  is  it  some¬ 
thing  richer,  more  complex  and  concrete  than  either  pleas¬ 
urable  feeling  or  the  service  of  reason?  The  Hedonist 
holds  that  the  ethical  standard  is  the  maximum  of  agree¬ 
able  feeling  for  the  individual  agent  and  his  fellows.  The 
Rationalist  holds  that  right  consists  in  the  subordination 
of  feeling  to  reason.  The  Energist  or  Self-Realizationist 
holds  that  the  standard  of  value  is  the  organization  and 
actuation  of  the  fundamental  interests  of  the  self  as  a 
rational  and  social  agent. 

The  controversy  over  the  concept  of  the  “highest  good” 
has  been  spun  out  at  inordinate  length,  and  with  unneces¬ 
sary  abstruseness,  in  treatises  on  ethics.  Making  a  dis¬ 
tinction  between  momentary  sensuous  pleasures  and  hap¬ 
piness  as  the  relatively  continuous  feeling  which  comes 
from  the  satisfaction  of  the  deepest  interests  of  human 
nature,  we  may  say  that  happiness  is  the  affective  index 
of  genuine  self-realization  by  the  socialized  individual  or 
person.  Therefore  we  may  say  that  the  highest  good  may 
be  called  either  happiness,  well  being  or  the  development 

and  activity  of  the  true  self  or  personality .  By  saying 

456 


ETHICS  AND  SOCIAL  PHILOSOPHY 


457 


this,  we  have  stated  succinctly,  but  not  solved  the  ethical 
problem.  For  the  crucial  questions  are  these — what  are 
the  elements  of  true  happiness  or  personal  well-being,  and 
under  what  natural  and  social  conditions  may  the  good  life 
be  lived? 

The  most  urgent  practical  problem  of  ethics  is  this — 
how  are  the  impulses  and  needs  of  human  individuality  to 
be  harmonized  with  the  existing  institutions,  customs,  and 
beliefs  whose  function  is  to  maintain  social  order  as  the 
condition  of  individual  well  being  ?  Is  it  possible  to 
formulate  a  principle  or  set  of  principles ,  by  which  the 
various  interests  of  human  beings  in  society  can  be  so  or¬ 
dered  as  to  take  their  places  in  a  consistent  and  workable 
system  of  practical  judgments  with  respect  to  their  several 
values  for  promoting  human  well-being.  It  is  admitted, 
by  all  ethicists,  that  human  well-being  is  the  supreme  end 
of  individual  conduct  and  social  order.  But  where  lay¬ 
men,  as  well  as  ethical  thinkers,  differ  are  on  the  ques¬ 
tions —  (1)  In  what  does  well-being  chiefly  consist,  or  on 
what  principles  are  choices  to  be  made  between  interests, 
each  of  which  may  be,  in  itself,  conducive  to  well-being, 
but  all  of  which  cannot  be  satisfied  in  equal  measure  or 
sometimes  cannot  be  satisfied  simultaneously  at  all  in  the 
given  circumstances?  and  (2)  How  can  social  life  be  best 
ordered  and  conducted  so  as  to  insure  the  maximum  satis¬ 
faction  of  the  genuine  human  interests  ?  For  example, 
which  are  to  be  preferred  and  to  what  extent,  relative  to 
one  another — physical  health  and  recreation,  social  enjoy¬ 
ment,  aesthetic  cultivation,  intellectual  development,  pub¬ 
lic  influence,  and  public  interests?  Should  the  individual, 
in  directing  his  own  life,  aim  at  surpassing  excellence  or 
efficiency  in  a  limited  field  of  endeavor  and  sacrifice  every¬ 
thing  else  to  this,  or  should  he  aim  at  the  all  round  culti¬ 
vation  and  exercise  of  his  powers?  Is  the  epitaph  said  to 
appear  on  a  tombstone,  “Here  lies  one  who  was  born  a 


458 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


man  and  died  a  grocer !  ’  ’  the  memorial  of  a  human  fail¬ 
ure?  Should  a  man  devote  himself  primarily  to  the  care 
of  his  family,  and  neglect  or  subordinate  public  service  or 
the  cultivation  of  aesthetic  or  intellectual  capacities,  in 
order  to  lay  up  economic  wealth  for  his  family  ?  How  far, 
and  in  what  circumstances  may  or  should  the  well-being 
or  life  of  the  individual  or  smaller  groups,  such  as  the 
family  or  the  community,  be  sacrificed  to  the  welfare  of 
larger  social  groups,  such  as  the  nation  or  the  church  ? 
How  far  should  the  welfare  of  the  members  of  the  present 
generation  be  sacrificed  to  the  welfare  of  the  generations 
to  come  ?  How  far  should  the  means  for  the  achievement 
of  cultural  goods  of  exceptionally  high  quality,  appreciated 
and  used  by  a  comparatively  few  members  of  society,  be 
sacrificed  to  the  distribution  of  creature  comforts  to  the 
masses?  In  short,  what  things  are  really  good  for  men 
to  seek,  and  what  are  their  respective  degrees  of  prefera¬ 
bility  ? 

I  may  here  remind  the  reader  of  a  distinction  to  which 
attention  has  several  times  been  called  in  the  present  work. 
I  refer  to  the  distinction  between  instrumental  or  mediate, 
and  intrinsic  or  immediate  values.  Ethics  is  concerned 
primarily  with  immediate  or  intrinsic  values.  It  asks 
what  things  or  interests  of  man  are  good  on  their  own  ac¬ 
count,  or  for  their  own  sakes,  as  constituting  worthful 
elements  in  a  worthy  human  life.  Such  sciences  as  engi¬ 
neering,  medicine,  and  economics,  are  concerned  with  in¬ 
strumental  values,  that  is,  with  things  that  have  value 
as  means  for  the  support  and  conduct  of  social  life  in  such 
ways  that  man  will  thereby  be  enabled  to  seek  and  realize 
the  intrinsic  values.  Machinery,  physical  health,  and  eco¬ 
nomic  wealth  are  instruments,  not  ends  or  values  in  them¬ 
selves.  They  are  ministrants  to  human  welfare.  Hence, 
ethics  is  concerned  with  these  values  and  the  processes  by 
which  they  are  attained,  only  in  so  far  as  such  concern  is 


ETHICS  AND  SOCIAL  PHILOSOPHY  459 


necessary  to  determine  their  bearing  on  the  intrinsic  values 
of  human  well-being. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  all  human  valuations  have  their 
roots  in  feelings.  Things  have  positive  value  in  so  far  as 
they  satisfy  interests  or  desires ,  and  negative  value  in  so 
far  as  they  thwart  the  satisfaction  of  interests.  Anything 
has  value  that  satisfies  or  promises  to  satisfy  an  interest  of 
a  self.  A  satisfaction  is  an  agreeable  feeling — agreeable 
because  it  agrees  with  some  tendency,  interest  or  desire  of 
the  self.  But  men  reflect  upon,  compare,  and  weigh  their 
immediate  feelings  of  value.  It  is  only  in  so  far  as  they 
do  this  that  they  make  judgments  of  value.  Thought  or 
reason  is  able  to  take  an  objective,  impartial,  or  imper¬ 
sonal,  and  social  standpoint  in  regard  to  values.  Moral 
ideas  and  ideals,  and  the  science  of  ethics,  which  is  the 
systematic  attempt  to  organize  moral  ideas,  are  the  results 
of  the  exercise  of  the  power  of  reflective  judgment  upon 
the  immediate  feelings  of  value.  The  individual’s  feelings 
of  values  are  first  licked  into  some  sort  of  coherent  shape 
by  the  discipline  of  the  social  code,  in  the  midst  of  which 
he  is  reared  and  lives.  Then,  when  he  comes  to  reflective 
maturity,  he  critically  examines  this  code,  to  see  if  it  is 
consistent  with  the  ideals  of  value,  which  he  may  have  ac¬ 
quired  by  independent  reflection,  or  from  some  other  source 
in  literature,  history,  or  science,  or  perhaps,  from  a  com¬ 
bination  of  all  these  sources.  The  science  of  ethics  is 
always  the  reflective  enterprise  of  critically  examining 
social  codes  of  conduct.  If  mankind  had  a  perfect  social 
code,  or  did  not  need  one,  there  would  be  no  occasion  for 
ethical  inquiry.  Since  men  must  live  in  society,  they  must 
have  codes  of  social  conduct.  Since  society  is  complex  and 
dynamic,  since  it  is,  in  advancing  civilizations,  always  in 
movement,  no  merely  traditional  or  customary  code  of 
society  is  adequate  to  meet  the  new  occasions  which  demand 
new  duties  and  new  formulations  of  values,  and  the  scien- 


460 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


tific  study  of  Ethics  is  not  only  necessary  but  is  of  the 
utmost  practical  value.  It  is  simply  the  systematic  and 
persistent  application  of  thought  or  reason  to  the  problem 
of  social  values.  In  a  completely  static  society  the  ethical 
problem  never  arises.  But  no  civilized  society  is  ever 
completely  static.  For  man  is  a  restless  being  and,  even 
in  ages  that  are  conservative  or  static,  there  is  always  the 
problem  of  applying  accepted  social  principles  of  valuation 
to  changing  situations.  In  ages  like  our  own,  in  which 
civilization  is  in  flux,  the  very  foundations  of  the  princi¬ 
ples  of  socal  valuation  must  be  reexamined,  in  the  light  of 
history,  social  psychology,  natural  science,  and  philosophy. 
There  is  no  more  urgent  need  of  the  present  than  the  re¬ 
formulation  of  a  system  of  social  values.  Conscience,  the 
popular  name  for  the  moral  consciousness  or  faculty  of 
moral  judgment  in  the  individual,  is,  in  varying  degrees, 
the  composite  resultant  of  the  social  code  in  which  the 
individual  is  nurtured  and  his  own  reflective  consideration 
of  this  code. 

Many  moralists,  including  the  Stoics,  the  medieval  Chris¬ 
tian  philosophers,  Kant,  Bishop  Butler,  and  James  Mar- 
tineau,  have  held  that  mankind  has,  in  conscience,  a  power 
of  unerring  moral  judgment,  which,  if  used  and  obeyed 
will  always  tell  men  what  is  right  and  wrong,  good  and  bad. 
Kant  holds  that  conscience  does  not  err,  but  wTe  err  by  not 
hearkening  to  our  consciences.  Bishop  Butler  said  that, 
when  we  sit  down  in  a  calm  hour,  we  can  know  what  is 
right.  He  said  that,  if  conscience  had  might,  as  it  has 
right,  it  would  rule  the  world.  This  doctrine  of  an  innate 
and  unerring  faculty  of  moral  judgment  is  called  intuition- 
ism.  Intuitionists  do  not  assert  that  reflection  is  unneces¬ 
sary.  They  recognize  that  the  application  of  the  power  of 
moral  judgment  to  specific  cases  requires  reflection.  What 
they  hold  is  that  we  have  the  power,  if  we  will  use  it.  The 
intuitionist  doctrine  is  the  source  of  the  doctrine  of  the 


ETHICS  AND  SOCIAL  PHILOSOPHY  461 


Natural  Rights  of  man.  It  is  ethical  and  political  rational¬ 
ism,  since  it  deduces,  from  the  deliverances  of  conscience, 
the  fundamental  principles  of  social  conduct — the  rights 
and  duties  of  men  in  society.  It  stresses  the  absolute 
bindingness  of  moral  obligations,  and  deduces  from  these 
the  system  of  laws  and  political  relationships.  Intuitionism 
has  played  a  noble  role  in  the  social  and  political  develop¬ 
ment  of  European  and  American  society.  The  intuitionist 
insists  on  the  absolute  authority  of  duty,  right,  obligations. 
As  to  the  source  of  this  authority,  we  find  differences  of 
opinion  among  intuitionists.  The  theological  intuitionists 
regard  conscience,  or  the  moral  sense,  as  the  voice  of  God 
in  the  human  soul.  The  Stoics  and  Kant  regard  conscience 
as  the  supreme  and  sole  authentic  utterance  of  God  in  the 
spirit  of  man.  More  orthodox  Christian  intuitionists  find 
two  sources  of  moral  authority — the  conscience  of  the  indi¬ 
vidual  and  the  voice  of  a  special  divine  revelation  speaking 
in  Jesus  Christ.  These  two  sources  are  believed  to  be  in 
harmony ;  but  many  would  say  that  the  specific  revelation 
adds,  to  the  rational  utterances  of  the  natural  conscience, 
the  supernatural  goods  of  love  and  grace  and  the  assurance 
of  immortality. 

The  fundamental  difficulty  with  intuitionism,  if  taken 
on  all  fours  as  a  complete  theory  of  the  origin  of  our  moral 
judgments,  is  that  it  does  not  harmonize  with  the  facts  of 
man’s  moral  history.  Humankind  has  not  agreed  in  the 
past,  nor  does  it  agree  now,  as  to  what  deeds  and  motives 
are  right  and  wrong,  good  and  bad.  With  respect  to  the 
relations  of  the  sexes,  property,  human  life,  social  and 
political  rights  and  obligations,  and  other  matters,  there 
is  a  bewildering  diversity  and  disagreement  as  to  what  is 
right  and  wrong,  good  and  bad.  As  Kipling  puts  the  case — 

The  wildest  dreams  of  Kew  are  the  facts  of  Khatmandu, 

And  the  crimes  of  Clapham  are  chaste  in  Martaban. 

Conscientious  persons,  even  those  nurtured  in  the  same 


462 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


culture,  but  in  different  strata  and  with  different  affiliations 
— for  example,  the  labor  unionist  and  the  financial  magnate 
— may  honestly  disagree  in  regards  to  the  ethics  of  industry, 
the  ethics  of  art,  or  the  ethics  of  marriage.  Even  those  who 
agree  that  the  Christian  revelation  is  the  supreme  authority 
for  conscience  by  no  means  agree  in  their  moral  judgments. 
Roman  Catholics,  Greek  Catholics,  and  Protestants  disagree 
in  regard  to  many  moral  questions.  Even  Protestants 
disagree  with  one  another.  Nor  do  we  find  complete  agree¬ 
ment  even  among  Roman  Catholics.  The  agreement  ap¬ 
proaches  completeness  in  the  degree  in  which  there  has 
been  similarity  of  social  nurture ;  although  even  here  some 
allowance  must  be  made  for  inborn,  individual  differences. 
This  allowance  must  be  increased  as  the  social  and  cultural 
order  becomes  more  complex  and  gives  nurture  and  free 
scope  for  the  development  of  individual  personalities.  The 
fact  seems  to  be  that,  as  W.  K.  Clifford  put  it,  in  simpler 
types  of  society  the  individual  conscience  is  the  echo  of 
“the  tribal  self.”  Even  in  complex  and  advanced  cultures, 
human  consciences,  as  complexes  of  moral  judgments,  are 
made,  for  many  individuals  almost  entirely,  and  for  all 
individuals  in  large  measure,  by  the  whole  cultural  complex 
of  social  conditions  in  which  the  individual  lives.  The  most 
enlightened  and  conscientious  of  us  have  to  be  on  guard 
against  two  moral  dangers — (1)  The  danger  of  being  satis¬ 
fied  with  the  commonplace  morality  of  our  class,  group,  or 
clique.  (2)  The  danger  of  moral  priggishness  or  fanaticism ; 
of  setting  up  our  own  private  feelings  and  individual 
prejudices  as  the  measures  of  right  and  wrong.  The  moral 
life  requires  incessant  thoughtfulness  and  open  mindedness, 
no  less  than  courage  and  loyalty  to  the  best. 

Intuitionism  has  this  element  of  truth — in  the  last 
analysis,  the  enlightened  individual,  in  a  free  and  complex 
society,  must  decide  the  problems  of  moral  value,  of  right 
and  duty,  of  good  and  bad,  by  a  reflective  or  conscientious 


ETHICS  AND  SOCIAL  PHILOSOPHY 


463 


choice.  But  as  a  theory  of  the  origin  of  all  human  ideas  of 
right  and  wrong  it  is  erroneous.  Opposed  to  intuitionism 
is  the  teleological  theory  of  morality — so  called  because  it 
traces  the  origin,  as  well  as  the  authority  of  moral  ideas  to 
human  beliefs  in  regard  to  their  ends  or  purposes.  The 
teleologist  holds  that  right  conduct  is  that  which  is  believed 
to  promote  some  social  value,  some  individual  well-being, 
or,  more  often  both,  since  society  and  the  individual  are 
interdependent.  The  ideologist  maintains  that  the  specific 
judgments  of  conscience  are  the  results  of  the  influence  of 
the  social  environment  working  through  example  and  in¬ 
struction,  and  by  suggestion,  reward  and  punishment,  on 
the  individual  mind.  The  teleologist  holds  that  the  specific 
types  of  moral  action  which  a  type  of  society  teaches 
and  enforces  are  those  which  have  been  hit  upon,  either 
by  a  dominant  class,  or  by  the  collective  wisdom  of  a 
group,  as  conditions  of  the  group  welfare.  Take,  for 
example,  the  institution  of  private  property ;  the  intui- 
tionist  holds  that  conscience  tells  us,  if  we  but  listen 
to  it,  that  the  social  rights  and  obligations  appertaining  to 
private  property  are  founded  in  the  nature  of  things. 
Private  property  is  for  him  a  'natural  right.  The  teleologist 
argues  that  the  justification  of  private  property  is  to  be 
found  in  its  value  as  an  instrument  for  promoting  human 
happiness.  Therefore,  if,  owing  to  changes  in  the  economic 
field  of  production  and  distribution,  the  existing  forms  of 
this  institution  hinder,  rather  than  promote,  general  human 
well-being,  the  institution  must  be  modified.  The  ultra¬ 
conservative  thus  appeals  to  intuition  and  the  past ;  the 
teleologist  replies  that  new  occasions  give  rise  to  new  duties 
and  that,  if  the  property  laws  of  the  forefathers  no  longer 
promote  general  well-being,  they  have  lost  their  justification. 

The  intuitionist  might  reply  that  conscience  only  gives 
authoritative  deliverances  in  regard  to  fundamental  ethical 
principles — such  as  the  inherent  worth  and  dignity  of 


464 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


personality,  the  social  relations  of  justice,  cooperation,  and 
love.  The  application  of  these  principles  would  be  left  to 
be  determined  by  experience  and  on  grounds  of  expediency. 
In  this  way  intuitionism  and  teleology  in  ethics  might  be 
reconciled.  Let  us  admit  that  the  human  conscience  is 
moulded  bv  its  social  environment.  Nevertheless,  is  it  not 
the  case  that,  when  the  normal  individual  comes  to  maturity, 
he  can,  by  reflection,  arrive  at  certain  universally  valid, 
ethical  principles,  although  he  may  be  much  in  doubt  as  to 
how  precisely  these  principles  can  be  best  applied  in  the 
existing  circumstances  ?  If  there  are  universally  valid 
ethical  principles  or  values,  if  there  is  a  final  good  for  man, 
then  the  fundamental  problem  of  the  metaphysics  of  ethics 
is  this — what  status  have  human  values  in  the  universe  as 
a  whole  ?  This  question  is  discussed  in  the  next  chapter. 

It  cannot  be  doubted  that  social  custom,  established  usage, 
is  the  main  factor  in  determining  the  moral  judgments,  as 
well  as  the  legal  enactments,  that  pass  current  in  human 
society.  But  when,  as  notably  in  the  present  hour,  the 
customary  or  institutional  modes  of  procedure  and  judg¬ 
ment  upon  such  matters  as  private  property,  marriage,  and 
the  power  of  the  state  over  the  individual,  seem  to  be 
breaking  down,  in  the  face  of  economic  conditions  brought 
to  pass  by  the  industrial  revolution,  it  is  necessary  to 
reexamine  the  entire  foundations  of  our  inherited  standards 
of  judgments.  This  means  to  seek  a  philosophy  or  thought- 
out  doctrine  of  the  right  relations  between  individuals  as 
members  of  society. 

Moral  conduct  is  conduct  that  has  social  reference,  so 
that  ethics  and  social  philosophy  cannot  be  sharply  distin¬ 
guished. 

Social  and  political  philosophy ,  in  distinction  from 
sociology  and  politics,  which  are  sciences  descriptive  of 
actual  social  and  political  institutions  in  the  present  and 
in  history,  is  concerned  with  the  ethical  ends  or  values  that 


ETHICS  AND  SOCIAL  PHILOSOPHY  465 


are  involved  in  social  institutions  and  activities.  It  studies 
the  facts  of  social  and  political  life  from  the  standpoint  of 
a  systematic  doctrine  of  the  ethical  values  or  ends  that 
should  be  realized  by  social  institutions,  by  family,  school, 
industry,  the  state.  Social  philosophy  is  thus  really  applied 
ethics — the  system  of  moral  valuations  applied  to  the 
judgment  of  existing  institutions,  such  as  school  organiza¬ 
tion,  economic  organization,  and  political  organization,  in 
the  light  of  the  intrinsic  human  values  or  human  interests 
which  these  organizations  exist  to  further.  Thus,  ethics  is 
inseparable  from  social  philosophy,  as  Plato  and  Aristotle 
long  ago  soundly  taught.  Ethics  is  the  philosophical  doc¬ 
trine  of  human  values,  of  the  various  inherently  worthful 
interests  or  ends  which  mankind  has  the  right  and  duty  to 
aim  to  attain  and  conserve. 

The  investigation  of  the  problems  of  ethics  and  social 
philosophy  involves  psychology,  since  their  subject  matter 
is  man  as  a  feeling,  thinking,  and  striving  agent.  A  sound 
ethical  and  social  doctrine  of  ends  and  values  can  be  built 
up  only  upon  an  adequate  psychology — one  which  makes  a 
careful  inventory  of  man’s  original  nature,  his  inheritance 
of  instincts,  impulses,  and  more  general  capacities,  such  as 
reason  or  intelligence.  But  man’s  original  nature  is  pro¬ 
foundly  modified  by  his  social  nurture,  including  the  social 
and  spiritual  patterns  and  ideals  of  conduct  which  are  held 
up  to  him  for  admiration  and  imitation  in  his  plastic  period 
of  youth.  A  sound  theory  of  ethical  and  social  values  can 
be  formulated  only  when  the  various  cultural  or  spiritual- 
historical  strains  which  shape  and  stimulate  the  individual 

in  societv  have  been  examined  and  evaluated. 

%/ 

Ethics  and  social  philosophy  must,  therefore,  be  based 
on  an  extensive  and  intensive  appreciation  of  the  historical 
development  of  the  whole  spiritual  heritage  of  man. 

There  are  two  sharply  contrasted  social  philosophies — 
individualism  and  collectivism.  We  might  consider  these 


466 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


as  political  doctrines ;  from  the  individualistic  standpoint 
the  true  end  of  government  is  to  insure  the  maxim  liberty  of 
action  to  the  individual  that  is  consistent  with  the  mainte¬ 
nance  of  social  order ;  the  only  justification  for  interference 
with  individual  liberty  is  the  protection  of  other  individuals 
in  the  exercise  of  their  liberties.  Collectivism  is  the  theory 
that  the  true  function  of  government  is  to  subordinate  indi¬ 
vidual  liberty  to  the  maintenance  and  progress  of  the  nation 
or  society  as  a  whole.  But  at  the  present  time  it  is  not  in 
the  realm  of  politics,  except  as  a  handmaid  of  economics, 
that  this  opposition  is  acute.  We  may  admit  that  govern¬ 
ment  exists  to  promote  liberty  with  order ;  that  is,  liberty 
for  the  individual  in  so  far  as  this  is  compatible  with  a  like 
liberty  for  all  other  individuals. 

The  acute  opposition  to-day  is  between  economic  individ- 
ualism  and  economic  collectivism.  For  our  economic  order 
is  so  collectivistic  in  character,  so  completely  enmeshed  is 
the  average  individual  in  the  toils  of  industry  organized  on 
a  large  scale,  that  political,  intellectual,  and  religious  liberty 
are  more  or  less  mocking  delusions  if  the  economic  order 
does  not  permit  the  individual  to  live  decently.  Our  present 
economic  order  is  increasingly  collectivistic  in  organization 
while  individualistic  in  control,  in  the  sense  that  private 
groups,  which  governments  either  do  not  control  or  at  best 
control  rather  badly,  dominate  the  policies  of  industry.  To 
a  large  extent,  privately  organized  group  interests  control 
our  law-making.  When  an  employer  or  a  group  thereof 
have  a  controversy  with  union  labor  the  public  usually 
stands  helplessly  looking  on,  and,  when  it  is  settled,  pays 
the  bills. 

Must  we  then  have  greater  public  control  in  the  interests 
of  fuller  economic  freedom  and  opportunity?  If  so,  must 
we  go  much  farther  in  the  direction  of  state  socialism  or  of 
that  modified  form  thereof  called  guild  socialism?  It  is 
impossible  to  do  more  than  raise  such  questions  here,  in 


ETHICS  AND  SOCIAL  PHILOSOPHY 


467 


order  to  show  the  ethical  principles  involved.  There  can 
be  no  just  and  permanent  solutions  of  these  and  related 
problems,  unless  the  solutions  are  based  on  ethical  prin¬ 
ciples.  Justice  must  guide  expediency. 

What  then  is  justice  in  the  economic  relationships  of 
man?  This  again  is  a  large  and  complicated  question 
which  there  is  not  room  to  discuss  here.  I  must  be  brief 
and  dogmatic.  The  fundamental  problem  of  social  ethics 
is  the  problem  of  justice.  Ethical  justice  implies  that  every 
individual  (not  one  fourth  or  even  nine  tenths  of  them) 
shall  have  a  fair  opportunity  to  an  education  that  will  enable 
him  to  develop  his  powers ;  and  the  opportunity  for  a  means 
of  livelihood  that  will  enable  him,  while  doing  his  bit  for 
the  economic  and  cultural  life  of  society,  to  lead  a  decent 
life  as  a  member  of  a  family,  a  citizen,  and  through  all  the 
relations  of  a  human  person. 

There  are  three  principal  ways  by  which  a  nearer  ap¬ 
proach  to  equality  of  opportunity  among  human  beings 
may  be  sought :  1.  By  the  continuance  of  the  present  system 
of  private  enterprise,  with  the  extension  of  public  control 
through  regulation  and  taxation ;  particularly,  by  the 
graduated  income  and  inheritance  taxes  and  the  excess 
profits  tax.  This  method  might  even  go  the  length  of  fixing 
maximal  rates  of  profits  in  various  enterprises,  the  surplus 
to  be  used  for  the  common  good  in  public  works,  education, 
et  cetera.  This  general  procedure  might  be  accompanied 
by  an  extension  of  free  cooperation  in  industry  and  trade. 
It  would  imply  a  much  more  ungrudging  recognition  of 
labor  unions. 

2.  State  socialism.  This  means  public  ownership,  and 
either  public  operation  or  private  operation  under  lease,  of 
the  chief  industries.  It  could  not  be  applied  to  small  trades 
or  agriculture. 

3.  Guild  socialism.  The  ownership  and  operation  of  the 
chief  industries  by  the  workers,  the  state  to  serve  only  as 


468 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


the  arbiter  to  regulate  the  rates  of  reward  and  thus  deter¬ 
mine  the  prices  of  the  products  in  the  interests  of  the 
consumers. 

It  would  require  too  much  space  to  discuss  the  ethical 
aspects  of  these  three  plans.  Their  operative  practicability 
involves  many  technical  questions ;  but,  in  the  last  analysis, 
the  feasibility  of  any  social  scheme  depends  on  human 
motivation  and,  therefore,  comes  down  to  problems  in  the 
psychology  and  ethics  of  conduct.  Human  nature  includes 
certain  inexpugnable  impulses  or  “  propulsions,  ’ ’  as  older 
writers  called  them.  Chief  among  these  impulses  are  the 
sex  impulse,  the  possessive  impulse,  the  craving  for  power 
and  social  recognition,  the  constructive  impulse,  or  the 
impulse  of  workmanship.  These  impulses  are  plastic  and 
can  be  turned  in  various  directions  under  the  influence  of 
the  social  environment.  Social  institutions  are  the  moulds 
which  shape  the  natural  impulses.  The  mature  individual 
becomes  a  creature  of  habit  through  the  set  which  his  native 
impulses  have  been  given  during  the  years  of  training.  No 
economic  or  other  social  system  will  work  which  thwarts  a 
strong  and  ineradicable  human  impulse.  The  best  system 
will  be  one  which  gives  most  scope  for  the  harmonious 
development  of  man’s  basic  impulses.  Any  proposed 
economic  change  must  reckon  with  the  sex  and  family  im¬ 
pulses,  with  the  possessive  impulse,  with  the  impulse  of 
craftsmanship,  and  with  the  striking  differences  in  the 
impulses  towards  power  and  social  influence  that  human 
beings  have.  It  must  also  reckon  with  the  native  inequali¬ 
ties  among  human  beings,  with  respect  to  their  physical, 
intellectual,  emotional,  and  practical  capacities.  In  the 
light  of  these  considerations  it  seems  to  the  writer  probable 
that  the  continuance  and  extension  of  the  present  plan  of 
public  control  of  the  industrial  system  is  most  in  accord 
with  the  psychology  of  conduct,  and  that  its  ethical  injus¬ 
tices  are  to  a  large  extent  remediable.  It  is  doubtless 


ETHICS  AND  SOCIAL  PHILOSOPHY 


469 


impossible,  by  public  action,  ever  to  remove  all  causes  of 
social  injustice,  but  it  is  probably  possible  to  insure  a  larger 
measure  of  equalization  of  opportunity.  This  is  all  that  can 
be  humanly  expected.  Minimal  wage  scales  with  moderate 
working  hours  and  a  better  provision  for  education  and 
recreation  would  go  far  in  the  direction  of  equalization  of 
opportunity. 


References 

Ethics 

*  Introductory  Works  by  Drake,  Fite,  MacKenzie,  Seth  and 

Wright. 

Alexander,  S.,  Moral  Order  and  Progress. 

Dewey  and  Tufts,  Ethics. 

*  Everett,  W.  G.,  Moral  Values. 

Green,  T.  H.,  Prolegomena  to  Ethics. 

Hobhouse,  L.  T.,  Morals  in  Evolution ,  and  The  Rational  Good. 

*  Mill,  J.  S.,  Utilitarianism. 

Moore,  G.  E.,  Principia  Ethica. 

*  Paulsen,  F.,  Ethics. 

Rashdall,  Hastings,  The  Theory  of  Good  and  Evil. 

Rogers,  A.  K.,  The  Theory  of  Ethics. 

Social  Philosophy 

Bosanquet,  B.,  The  Philosophical  Theory  of  the  State. 

Dewey,  J.,  Human  Nature  and  Conduct. 

Hegel,  Philosophy  of  Right. 

Hobhouse,  L.  T.,  Justice. 

MacIver,  R.  M.,  Community. 

MacKenzie,  Outlines  of  Social  Philosophy. 

McDougall,  Social  Psychology. 

Mill,  J.  S.,  On  Liberty. 

Santayana,  G.,  Reason  in  Society. 

Wallas,  Graham,  The  Great  Society. 


CHAPTER  XXVII 


THE  STATUS  OF  VALUES 

Since  man  is  not  a  colorless  and  passive  knower,  who 
might  reflect  the  characteristics  of  his  surroundings  as  a 
good  mirror  reflects  things,  or  as  a  glassy  water  surface 
reflects  its  bank,  but  a  knower  who  feels  and  acts ,  he  judges 
the  objects  he  knows  to  have  various  degrees  and  kinds  of 
worth  and  unworth ;  and  he  strives  to  so  alter  or  maintain 
the  interaction  of  his  surroundings  and  himself  as  to  remove 
the  experiences  that  have  unworth  for  him,  and  to  maintain 
and  increase  these  experiences  that  have  worth. 

Knowing  is  a  human  affair.  The  objects  of  knowledge 
may  be  physical  things,  complexes  of  sense  qualities,  that  is, 
groupings  of  the  qualities  apprehended  through  man’s  per¬ 
ceptive  mechanism ;  or  relations  between  physical  objects 
and  events,  that  is,  laws  of  nature  generalized  by  the  mind 
from  the  analysis  and  comparison  of  sense  perceptions ;  or 
selves  and  their  actual  relations  to  the  physical  order  and 
to  one  another ;  or,  finally,  the  objects  of  knowledge  may  be 
the  appreciations  or  valuations  with  which  man  stamps  the 
objects  known,  and  the  aims  and  ideals  by  which  he  deter¬ 
mines  his  active  relations  to  physical  nature  and  to  other 
selves. 

There  are  some  things  in  the  world  of  my  daily  round 
of  experiences  that  have  little  or  no  plus  or  minus  value 
for  me.  To  meet  and  apprehend  them  has  little  or  no  bear¬ 
ing  on  my  weal  or  w~oe.  Such  are  most  of  the  buildings 
and  many  of  the  people  I  pass  in  the  streets.  Ordinarily, 

I  ignore  them.  I  am  scarcely  aware  of  their  existence.  On 

470 


THE  STATUS  OF  VALUES 


471 


the  other  hand,  the  buildings  in  which  I  live  and  work, 
the  members  of  my  family,  and  my  professional  associates, 
and  even  the  weather,  have  worth  for  me.  I  apprehend 
them  with  interest  and  I  react  to  them  with  approval  and 
disapproval.  I  exercise  preferences  in  regard  to  the  actual 
and  possible  objects  of  experience. 

In  short,  man  appreciates,  enjoys,  loves,  admires,  and 
therefore  seeks,  or  he  dislikes,  fears,  hates,  and  therefore 
avoids  certain  objects  and  situations.  Valuation  is  the 
most  persistent  and  characteristic  attitude  in  human  nature. 
Man  seeks  to  acquire  and  retain  knowledge,  power,  wealth, 
comfort,  fame,  love,  and  friendship,  because  he  values 
these  things  as  experiences.  The  systematic  study  of  the 
main  types  of  human  valuation  and  the  relations  between 
them  is  an  important  part  of  philosophy.  As  we  shall  see, 
in  Chapter  XXXI,  ethics,  aesthetics,  and  the  philosophy  of 
religion,  are  sciences  of  human  values  or  axiological 
sciences.  The  word  “axiology”  means  science  of  values. 
It  is  derived  from  the  Greek  a£ioc  (worth)  and  Acyoc 
(reason).  All  these  divisions  of  philosophy  are  concerned 
primarily  with  the  central  fact  that  man,  in  the  various 
aspects  of  his  cognitive  and  active  relations  to  his  world, 
is  a  being  guided  by  selective  preferences  or  interests. 
These  preferences,  in  the  last  analysis,  are  derived  from 
feelings,  from  the  emotions  and  sentiments  which  constitute 
the  affective  complex  which  is  the  self  considered  as  a  center 
of  feeling  and  source  of  valuation,  choice,  and  volition. 

Here  we  are  concerned  only  with  making  distinctions  and 
definitions  with  sufficient  sharpness  to  see  what  is  the 
problem  of  the  status  of  human  values  in  reality.  And, 
first,  we  note  that  there  is  an  important  distinction  in 
human  values  between  instrumental  or  mediate  values  and 
intrinsic  or  immediate  values.  Wealth,  position,  manual 
skill,  tools,  knowledge  of  foreign  languages,  are  usually 
means  to  ends.  My  pen,  for  instance,  has  only  an  instru- 


472 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


mental  value.  It  mediates  my  getting  my  thoughts  on 
paper,  and  this  achievement,  in  turn,  is  a  means  to  getting 
them  noticed  and  accepted  by  my  fellows.  On  the  other 
hand,  to  love  and  be  loved,  to  have  friends,  to  be  esteemed 
by  one’s  fellows,  are  values  in  themselves.  These  latter 
are  intrinsic  values.  To  live  in  these  experiences  is  to 
enjoy  immediate  values.  Even  to  know  the  facts  and  laws 
of  nature,  historical  facts  and  relations,  or  philosophical 
principles,  has,  for  some  people,  intrinsic  value.  One  may 
take  satisfaction  in  knowing  things,  regardless  of  whether 
anyone  else  knows  that  one  knows,  or  esteems  or  rewards 
one  for  knowing,  regardless  of  whether  knowing  makes  one 
healthier  or  wealthier,  or  physically  more  comfortable.  One 
values  knowledge  for  its  own  sake,  because  one  feels  that 
an  essential  demand  of  one’s  life  is  being  satisfied  by 
knowing.  Moreover,  certain  kinds  of  knowledge  give 
aesthetic  satisfaction.  We  speak  rightly  of  the  beauty  of  a 
piece  of  deductive  reasoning,  the  grandeur  or  sublimity  of 
a  scientific  principle,  such  as  that  of  gravitation  or  evolu¬ 
tion.  ^Esthetic  experiences  gained  through  poetry,  the 
drama,  fine  prose,  music,  painting,  or  the  enjoyment  of 
nature,  are  to  many  people  intrinsically  worthful.  ‘ 1  Beauty 
is  its  own  excuse  for  being.” 

While  many  persons  have  no  joy  in  knowledge  for  its 
own  sake  and,  hence,  knowledge  has  for  them  no  immediate 
worth ;  or,  have  no  keen  joy  in  beauty  for  its  own  sake 
which,  hence,  for  them  has  no  immediate  worth,  there  is 
one  type  of  values  which  is  universal  in  its  appeal.  The 
individual  who  has  no  preferences  in  this  type  is  an  idiot 
or  a  monster.  This  type  consists  of  the  fundamental  valua¬ 
tions  or  preferences  of  human  persons  as  individuals  and 
as  social  beings.  Every  normal  human  being  desires  the 
companionship,  esteem,  friendship  or  love  of  some  other 
human  beings.  Every  human  being  who  has  any  self- 
respect  desires  the  respect  of  others.  Every  human  being 


THE  STATUS  OF  VALUES 


473 


desires  to  satisfy  the  fundamental  interests  of  his  being, 
desires  to  feel  and  act  in  the  ways  that  express  and  realize 
what  he  esteems  his  true  selfhood.  Now,  ethics  is  the  scien¬ 
tific  or  systematic  study  of  these  fundamental  types  of 
human  value  and  of  the  principles  of  social  organization  by 
which  the  achievement  and  permanence  of  these  values  are 
furthered.  Honesty,  integrity,  justice,  fair-mindedness, 
active  sympathy,  conscientiousness,  kindness,  the  spirit  of 
service — these  terms  connote  qualities  of  selves  which  con¬ 
stitute  fundamental  ethical  values ;  because  they  are  not 
merely  indispensable  means  to  the  maintenance  of  a  social 
order  in  which  selves  can  be  truly  selves,  but,  moreover, 
they  are  intrinsically  worthful  qualities  of  human  nature. 
If  “love  is  the  fulfilling  of  the  law,”  that  is  because  love  is 
taken  to  include  all  the  other  qualities  in  the  presence  of 
which  man ’s  higher  selfhood  can  come  to  its  full  expression. 

And  all  the  movements  which  have  aimed  at  social  justice, 
at  the  bettering  of  the  economic,  industrial,  educational,  and 
political  conditions  of  man’s  social  life,  are  to  be  judged 
by  their  serviceableness  in  promoting  the  realization  of 
the  fundamental  human  values.  It  follows  that  all  intrinsic 
values  are  located  in  the  conscious  lives  of  selves  or  persons. 
It  is  nonsense  to  talk  about  values  that  no  self  feels  or 
seeks,  about  preferences  that  no  self  prefers.  The  status  of 
values  in  the  universe  of  reality  is  the  status  of  selves.  For 
selves  alone  feel,  enjoy,  suffer,  strive  for,  and  win  values. 
If  selves,  with  all  their  strivings,  sufferings,  and  enjoy¬ 
ments,  with  all  their  poignant  feelings  and  unremitting 
efforts,  are  but  evanescent  spume  cast  up  by  the  waves  of 
the  blind  and  chartless  ocean  of  being,  then  certainly  love 
and  justice,  integrity  and  loyalty,  and  the  other  ethical 
qualities  which  lend  dignity  and  worth  to  human  life  are 
equally  transient.  The  world  is  not  just  and  not  rational, 
much  less  kind,  if  the  whole  sequence  of  human  life,  in 
which  alone,  so  far  as  we  know  experimentally,  justice, 


474 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


reasonableness,  kindness,  are  to  be  found  in  finite  and 
imperfect  but  ever  present  and  ever  growing  forms  of 
realization,  is  doomed  to  extinction.  Indeed,  if  the  life  of 
selfhood,  the  life  which  is  now  throbbing  in  humanity,  does 
not  endure  and  grow  permanently  the  very  norms  of 
thought,  the  logical  values  themselves,  are  homeless  in  the 
universe  and  there  is  no  universe,  only  a  hideous  bedlam. 

Science  and  logic  postulate  the  rationality,  in  a  broad 
sense  the  justice,  of  the  universal  order.  Science  and  logic 
presuppose  the  validity  of  the  fundamental  intellectual 
values,  presuppose  the  obligation  to  observe  carefully,  to 
think  clearly,  disinterestedly,  and  persistently  about  what¬ 
ever  subject  matter  we  may  be  concerned  with.  In  the  last 
analysis  science,  logic,  and  ethics  rest  upon  the  same 
postulate — the  rationality  and  justice  of  things,  the  perma¬ 
nence  of  fundamental  values  in  the  order  of  reality.  But 
to  talk  about  reason,  much  less  justice  and  love  ruling  the 
universe,  if  all  selves  or  souls  are  ephemeral  phenomena,  is, 
I  repeat,  to  talk  nonsense.  To  talk  of  eternal  values  which 
rule  serenely  in  a  timeless  world  of  being,  if  the  life  of 
humanity  does  not  endure  somehow  as  an  essential  and 
worthful  constituent  in  the  universe  of  reality,  is  to  talk 
4  4  transcendental  moonshine.  ’  ’ 

Science,  a  better  social  order,  a  freer,  fuller  life  for 
human  personality,  beauty,  philosophy  itself,  are  all  vain 
dreams  which  man  conjures  up  to  hide  from  his  gaze  the 
reeking  shambles  of  reality  which  he  fears  to  face,  unless 
the  fundamental  human  values  endure  through  the  perma¬ 
nence  of  rational  and  ethical  spirit. 

The  last  and  deepest  problem  of  philosophy  which  is,  I 
remind  you,  the  reflective  study  of  life  and  experience  in 
their  wholeness,  is  the  problem  of  religion.  And  religion, 
as  I  have  already  pointed  out,  is  always  at  its  best  an  affir¬ 
mative  answer  to  the  final  question  of  humanity — do  our 
highest  values  endure  and  if  so,  under  what  conditions? 


THE  STATUS  OF  VALUES 


475 


The  true  meaning  of  postulating  a  God,  the  animating 
principle  of  faith  in  God  and  the  higher  order  of  which  he 
is  the  guardian  and  sustainer,  is  this  affirmative  response 
to  the  cry  of  mankind  for  the  assurance  or  promise  of  the 
permanence  of  ihe  life  of  most  worth.  Religion  is  the 
vea-sayer  to  all  the  higher  values.  If  it  denies  some  values 
dear  to  the  hearts  of  some  persons,  if  it  calls  to  renunciation 
and  sacrifice  of  the  lower  self,  it  does  this  in  the  interest  of 
higher  values. 

As  to  the  questions,  how  fundamental  values  come  to 
appear  in  the  life  of  humanity,  and  whence  they  derive 
their  authority,  three  chief  answers  have  been  given — 
1.  Dualistic  Supernaturalism,  2.  Agnostic  Relativism  or 
Subjectivistic  Humanism,  3.  Teleological  Idealism. 

1.  The  dualistic  supernaturalist  avers  that  the  source 
and  authority  of  all  supreme  values  is  the  descent  into 
human  life,  at  special  times  and  at  special  crises,  of  heaven¬ 
sent  messengers  authenticated  with  supernatural  power. 
The  “Thus  saith  the  Lord”  has  its  seal  in  miracle  working 
and  mystery  mongering.  Jahweh  thunders  from  Mount 
Sinai.  God  speaks  through  a  divine  revealer  and  validates 
his  utterances  with  physical  portents,  or  he  leaves,  through 
the  divinely  appointed  succession  of  a  hierarchical  order, 
continuous  special  authorities  in  an  ecclesia  or  church. 

2.  The  agnostic  relativist  points  to  the  fact  that  the 
language  and  the  very  contents  and  meanings  of  the  speech 
of  revealers  are  conditioned,  indeed,  determined  by  the 
whole  social  culture  of  their  times.  He  points,  with  the 
eye  of  the  critical  historian,  to  the  way  in  which  funda¬ 
mental  values  have  changed  and  evolved  under  the  influ¬ 
ences  of  industrial,  political,  and  scientific  changes.  He 
points  out,  for  example,  that  the  values  authorized  by 
Mosaic  religion  differed  from  those  of  later  Hebrew 
prophetism ;  the  latter  from  those  of  primitive  Christianity. 
He  triumphantly  shows,  by  historical  analysis,  that  the 


476 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


social  values  of  the  primitive  Christian  community  differed 
greatly  from  those  of  a  present  day  Christian  state.  He 
shows  that  the  change  is  due  to  a  mass  of  economic,  political, 
and  intellectual  changes.  Finally,  he  calls  attention  to  the 
significant  fact  that  dualistic  supernaturalism  rests  upon 
a  cosmology  that  is  inconsistent  with  modern  science.  The 
latter  has  built  up,  step  by  step,  a  conception  of  the  in¬ 
finite  extent,  complexity,  duration,  and  orderly  character 
of  a  world  in  which  there  is  no  place  for  the  eruption  now 
and  then  of  miraculous  portents. 

The  agnostic  relativist  concludes  that  the  human  values 
are  the  products  solely  of  the  social  workmanship  of  man, 
a  creature  weak  and  ephemeral  but  gifted  with  an  in¬ 
domitable  will  and  a  strange  capacity  for  planting  and 
training  up,  amidst  the  savage  wastes  of  the  blind  forces 
which  alone  operate  in  nature,  a  cultivated  plot  of  the 
finer  humanity.  Man,  he  says,  is  engaged  in  an  incessant 
struggle  with  the  savage  and  relentless  forces  of  nature. 
He  will  ultimately  go  down  to  defeat  and  extinction,  but 
in  the  meantime  the  only  life  of  effort  that  gives  at  least 
a  transitory,  though  pathetic,  gleam  of  grace  and  sweet¬ 
ness  to  life,  is  ceaseless  endeavor  to  improve  his  little 
garden  of  the  spirit,  to  tend  and  nurture  in  it  the  fruits 
and  flowers  of  honesty,  integrity,  loyalty,  justice,  truth¬ 
fulness,  comradeship,  and  sympathy.  These  values  are  all 
doomed  to  ultimate  extinction  but,  in  the  meantime,  let  us 
nobly  strive  and  nobly  help  one  another. 

The  agnostic  relativist  fails  to  solve  one  riddle.  How, 
if  nature  or  reality  be  as  he  conceives  it,  could  it  ever 
have  given  birth  to  man,  its  insurgent  son?  If  man,  too, 
be  but  the  blind  offspring  of  savage  and  insensate  forces, 
surely  it  makes  an  even  greater  draft  on  one’s  credulity 
to  say  that  from  the  blind  welter  of  mass  particles  in  end¬ 
less,  whirling  motion  there  could  have  sprung  the  tender¬ 
nesses,  the  heroisms,  the  noble  friendships,  the  undying  de- 


THE  STATUS  OF  VALUES 


477 


votions  to  human  kind,  the  willing  self-sacrifices  for  those 
illusions  of  great  causes  and  high  enterprises,  which  the 
better  part  of  mankind  displays?  How  could  even  such 
illusions  as  justice,  integrity,  sympathy,  love,  loyalty,  and 
self-sacrifice  have  come  into  being?  Agnostic  relativism, 
which  holds  that  values  have  no  status  except  in  the  better 
members  of  the  living  generation,  hence  is  a  subjectivism, 
in  which  the  present  living  generation  of  the  race,  not  the 
individual  self,  is  regarded  as  the  subject  who  creates 
values  out  of  nothing.  This  view  is,  of  course,  material¬ 
ism,  and  the  single  criticism  in  which  all  criticisms  of  ma¬ 
terialism  concenter  is  that  it  makes  all  human  values  illu¬ 
sions,  mysteriously  and  episodically  engendered  by  the 
operation  of  blind  physical  forces. 

3.  Teleological  or  Axiological  Idealism.  This  view  ac¬ 
cepts  the  criticisms  of  dualistic  supernaturalism  and  holds, 
too,  that  values  are  wrought  out  by  man  in  history  and, 
hence,  are  subject  to  fluctuation,  to  change  and  evolution, 
as  man’s  social  life  develops  from  simpler  to  more  com¬ 
plex  forms,  as  his  tools  for  intellectual  analysis  and  eco¬ 
nomic  and  social  organization  improve.  But  the  teleo¬ 
logical  idealist  holds  that  the  persistence  and  evolution  of 
values,  the  change  which  involves  continuity  of  growth  in 
the  process  of  discovering  values  and  means  to  realize  them, 
logically  implies  that  human  values,  and  the  selves  which 
realize  and  enjoy  them,  are  not  mere  ephemeral  by-prod¬ 
ucts  of  nature.  Man  is  a  true  and  effective  part  of  reality. 
He  is  a  legitimate  offspring  of  the  universe.  He  must  be 
heir  then  to  a  part  of  the  universal  heritage.  The  . values 
he  creates  he  does  not  create  out  of  nothing.  Values  are 
not  vain  imaginings.  It  is  the  same  being  who  perceives 
and  knows  wTho  likewise  values,  prefers,  chooses,  and  acts. 
It  is  the  same  homogeneous  world  in  which  he  grows  in 
knowledge  and  power,  and  in  the  consciousness  of  values, 
and  the  ability  to  realize  them.  Man  and  his  valuations 


478 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


are  somehow  at  home  in  the  universe.  Man  is  quite  as 
able  to  cash  in  on  his  preferences,  his  valuations,  as  he  is 
on  his  knowledge  or  his  industrial  activity.  The  universe 
which,  in  part,  we  know,  is  a  universe  which  answers  ques¬ 
tions  that  are  rightly  put  and  to  which  answers  are  per¬ 
sistently  sought.  It  is  the  same  teleological  order  which 
sustains  and  honors  human  values.  Values  are  neither 
mysterious  visitants  from  an  alien  sphere  nor  phantoms 
of  human  imagination.  Values  are  the  ways  in  which  the 
ruling  purport,  the  ineluctable  life  and  feeling  of  the  uni¬ 
verse,  are  expressed  in  a  multitude  of  finite  centers  of 
feeling  and  action — in  the  life  of  humanity. 

In  almost  all  the  great  historic  systems  of  philosophy, 
the  author’s  concept  of  value  determines  the  character  of 
his  fundamental  standpoint.1  The  ideas  that  play  the  chief 
part  in  Plato’s  interpretation  of  reality  are  ideas  of  values 
— logical  relations,  beauty,  justice,  wisdom;  and  the  su¬ 
preme  and  ruling  idea  is  the  good.  The  same  is  true  with 
regard  to  Aristotle.  God,  the  pure  form,  is  the  ground 
of  all  forms,  and  the  finite  forms  or  entelechies  are  the 
ordering  principles  in  nature.  The  highest  value  for 
Aristotle  is  the  aesthetic-intellectual  concept  of  the  pure 
self-activity  of  reason.  Plotinus’  conception  of  reality  is 
controlled  by  the  ideal  of  mystic  union  of  the  finite  self¬ 
hood  with  the  absolute  spirit.  Despite  his  show  of  geo¬ 
metrical  demonstration,  Spinoza’s  world  view  is  deter¬ 
mined  chiefly  by  his  vision  of  finite  selfhood  as  finding  its 
fulfillment  and  euthanasia  in  a  blessed  absorption  in  the 
divine  substance.  For  Leibnitz  the  supreme  values  are 
the  infinitely  diversified  individuality  of  the  monads  and 
the  continuity  and  organization  of  the  universe  into  a  har¬ 
monious  whole. 


1  Even  in  systems  of  materialism  it  is  the  apparent  clearness, 
simplicity,  self-evidence,  and  cogency  of  the  principles  that  deter¬ 
mines  the  standpoint  taken. 


THE  STATUS  OP  VALUES 


479 


Kant’s  system  is  controlled  by  his  concept  of  the  moral 
dignity  and  freedom  of  the  human  personality ;  of  the  tre¬ 
mendous  seriousness  and  infinite  significance  of  man’s 
moral  vocation.  The  same  motives  determined  the  funda¬ 
mental  outlines  of  Fichte’s  philosophy.  For  Hegel  the 
supreme  value  is  the  spectacle  of  the  self-realizing  march 
of  Spirit  through  history,  having  as  its  goal  the  harmoni¬ 
ous  organization  of  finite  selfhood  into  conscious  union 
with  the  infinite  idea.  For  Schopenhauer  the  peace  which 
comes  from  the  cessation  of  all  desire  and  the  ending  of  all 
inner  discord  is  the  highest  value. 

For  Berkeley  the  vision  of  God,  the  great  other  spirit,  is 
the  highest  value.  For  Hobbes,  Locke,  Hume,  and  Mill  the 
highest  value  lies  in  the  reconciliation  of  the  social  and 
political  freedom  of  the  individual  with  the  needs  of  a 
social  order  and  authority.  How  to  ensure  to  the  human 
individual  the  liberty  to  develop  and  lead  his  own  life  as 
a  member  of  the  social  order,  without  which  the  develop¬ 
ment  and  exercise  of  individuality  is  impossible — such  has 
been  the  dominant  problem  of  English  philosophy  from 
Hobbes  to  John  Stuart  Mill.  Mill  expressly  states  that  he 
was  led  to  his  logical  investigations  in  order  to  lay  secure 
foundations  for  a  science  of  society. 

It  is  in  this  British  feeling  for  the  worth  and  rights  of 
human  individuality  that  we  find  the  keynote  of  William 
James’  philosophy.  For  the  school  of  objective  idealism 
(Bradley,  Bosanquet,  and  others),  the  supreme  criterion 
of  value  is  the  harmonious  organization  of  experience  into 
a  systematic  whole,  the  fusion  or  union  of  all  aspects  of 
experience  into  a  living  totality,  in  which  all  differences 
are  unified,  all  conflicts  are  healed,  all  discords  are  har¬ 
monized.  In  this  harmonious  totality  the  contrast  be¬ 
tween  reflective  thinking  and  its  objects  passes  away  into 
a  perfect  intuition  or  state  of  feeling  in  which  knower  and 
known  are  wholly  one ;  the  conflict  between  the  ‘ 1  is  ”  and 


480 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


the  “ought-to-be,”  between  desired  ideal  and  achieved  fact, 
is  laid  at  rest.  In  it  all  pain  and  discord  are  contributing 
elements  in  the  harmonious  feeling  which  pervades  the 
whole.  The  whole  is  the  all-inclusive  individual  experience 
in  which  all  imperfect  individuals  are  elements.  Thus  the 
highest  value  is  the  highest  reality.  The  same  standard 
obtains  for  truth  as  for  other  aspects  of  value.  For  the 
measure  of  truth  in  any  system  of  judgments  is  the  inter¬ 
nal  coherence  of  the  system. 

Royce’s  conception  of  value  does  not  greatly  differ  from 
the  one  just  stated.  Absolute  reality  is  the  fulfillment  of 
all  values,  for  it  is  the  complete  fulfillment  of  the  meaning 
of  all  finite  ideas,  the  complete  satisfaction  of  all  finite 
purposes. 

The  chief  objections  raised  to  the  idealistic  theory  of  value 
are :  ( 1 )  in  its  eagerness  to  identify  the  absolute  value  of 
harmony,  internal  coherence,  perfection  of  organization  in 
experience,  with  reality,  it  overlooks  the  fact  that,  for 
human  beings,  value  is  an  ideal  aim  only  gradually  and 
partially  achieved  in  time,  and  thus  it  seems  to  deprive  the 
human  process  of  striving  for  and  achieving  harmonious 
organization,  the  whole  temporal  life  of  effort  and  progress 
towards  higher  values,  of  any  final  value.  For,  identifying 
absolute  value  and  absolute  realitv,  this  doctrine  assumes 
the  timeless  reality  of  the  ideal  values;  (2)  consequently, 
it  is  objected,  eternalistic  idealism  cannot  find  any  lasting 
significance  in  the  deeds  and  experiences  of  the  imperfect 
and  striving  human  individual. 

The  pragmatists  and  personal  idealists  have,  while  ad¬ 
mitting  that  the  ideal  of  value  is  harmonious  experience  or 
harmony  of  life  and  feeling,  protested  against  the  assump¬ 
tion  that  all  value  is  eternally  or  timelessly  real.  This 
protest,  on  behalf  of  the  human  person’s  life  as  a  process 
in  time,  is  the  chief  motive  of  the  tendency  known  as  tem- 
poralism,  which  insists  that  all  reality  must  traffic  in  time, 


THE  STATUS  OF  VALUES 


481 


that  value  must  inhere  in  the  temporal  activities  of  selves 
and  the  historical  order,  if  there  be  any  value  in  reality. 

Windelband,  Rickert,  and  other  representatives  of  the 
Philosophy  of  Values  in  Germany,  have  insisted  that  the 
validity  of  the  norms  of  logical  thinking,  the  very  basic 
principles  of  knowledge,  no  less  than  the  acceptance  of 
moral  ideals  and  canons  of  aesthetic  judgment,  rest  on 
the  act  of  the  thinker  in  accepting  the  conditions  under 
which  alone  the  purpose  and  will  to  know  the  truth,  to 
will  the  good,  and  to  accept  the  beautiful,  can  be  fulfilled. 
In  other  words,  if  you  seek  truth  you  ought  to  and  must 
accept  the  rules  of  the  thinking  game,  just  as  if  you  seek 
the  good  you  must  accept  the  norms  of  goodness.  This 
attitude  of  the  self  in  acknowledging  the  values  of  truth, 
goodness,  and  beauty  is  an  act  of  faith  in  universal  pur¬ 
poses  which  rule  the  time  order. 

From  our  standpoint  the  only  sense  in  which  we  can 
speak  of  eternal  values  is  that  there  are  universal  pur¬ 
poses  and  meanings  which  maintain  themselves  and  pre¬ 
vail  in  the  temporal  flux.  In  other  words  the  eternity  of 
values  means  their  active  perduration  through  the  endless 
process  of  change  and  evolution  and  their  continuing  vic¬ 
tory,  won  in  part  through  the  service  by  human  selves  of 
the  universal  purpose  or  universal  value. 

This  standpoint  I  call  teleological  idealism.  It  accepts, 
as  the  ideal  or  criterion  of  value,  the  harmonious  organ¬ 
ization  of  experience  in  persons.  It  finds  such  harmony 
fulfilled  in  the  development  of  truth  through  increasing 
coherence,  in  the  development  of  the  good  through  the 
organization  of  human  interests,  in  the  development  of 
feeling  through  the  fulfillment  of  aesthetic  ideals  and  per¬ 
sonal  affections.  But  it  does  not  admit  that  the  ideal  of 
value  is  in  all  its  fulness  timelessly  fulfilled  in  the  shape 
of  a  completed  reality.  It  does  not  admit  that  the  present 
order  of  facts  is  transparently  and  completely  the  fulfill- 


482 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


ment  or  expression  of  value.  It  finds  that  the  conflict  be¬ 
tween  actual  existence  and  ideals,  between  finite  fact  and 
value,  is  real  and  it  is  led  to  suppose  that  only  through 
continuous  activity  by  selves  can  this  conflict  be  overcome. 

Thus  teleological  idealism  admits  the  necessity  of  pos¬ 
tulating  a  ruling  principle  or  ground  of  values  in  the  uni¬ 
verse.  It  can  believe  in  progress  and  admit  retrogression 
in  the  values  of  life.  It  knows  no  absolute  but  the  abso¬ 
lute  need  that  man,  if  he  is  to  be  true  to  his  vocation  as  a 
spiritual  agent,  shall  loyally  cleave  to  the  service  of  the 
ideal  values,  to  steadfast  service  of  truth,  integrity,  justice, 
fellowship,  the  furtherance  of  beauty  and  harmony  in  the 
world  of  society  and  in  the  inner  man.  For  we  know  only 
in  part  and  prophesy  in  part  and  we  prophesy  in  faith 
according  to  the  measure  and  urgency  of  our  spiritual 
needs  and  cravings. 

Teleological  idealism  does  not  deny  that  in  special  indi¬ 
viduals,  and  at  significant  junctures  in  man’s  history,  old 
values  are  transformed  and  new  ones  created.  In  fact 
teleological  idealism  sees  in  the  religious  genius,  the  moral 
genius,  the  artistic  and  scientific  geniuses,  in  the  creative 
poet,  musician,  artist,  discoverer,  organizer  and  protago¬ 
nist  of  higher  ideals,  special  organs  through  which  the 
common  life  of  man  is  transformed  by  the  breaking  forth, 
into  a  new  power  of  creative  utterance,  of  the  universal 
spiritual  order,  the  ever  energizing  cosmic  meaning  of  life. 

The  problem  of  the  status  of  value  in  the  universe  is 
the  problem  of  the  status  of  humanity  or  selfhood.  The 
idea  of  God  is  that  of  a  supreme  reality  or  spiritual  order, 
in  and  through  which  human  personality  and  its  values 
are  sustained.  God  is  the  cosmical  ground  of  values,  the 
ground  of  human  personality,  the  overself  which  is  the 
source  and  goal  of  all  selfhood. 

The  evil  is  that  which  thwarts  values,  which  impedes 
and  destroys  them.  I  cannot  here  enter  upon  a  consid- 


THE  STATUS  OF  VALUES 


483 


eration  of  the  problem  of  evil.  Let  me  point  out  that, 
from  the  present  standpoint,  namely  that  God  means  the 
supreme  principle  or  ground  of  Values  and  of  personality, 
the  question  of  the  origin  of  evil  ceases  to  be  a  question 
of  vital  interest.  The  world  is  as  it  is,  no  matter  what 
were  the  conditions  of  its  origin.  There  is  no  point  in 
crying  over  the  irrevocable  past.  It  could  not  have  been 
otherwise,  either  from  the  point  of  view  of  materialism  or 
of  teleological  idealism.  The  apparent  wastefulness  and 
cruelty  of  the  natural  order  is  to  be  faced  as  a  fact.  These 
things  can  be,  and  are  being  controlled.  Man’s  inhuman¬ 
ity  to  man  is  capable  of  being  remedied.  Nature’s  inhu¬ 
manity  to  man  has  been  in  part  overcome  and  may  be  still 
more  successfully  lessened,  when  man’s  social  capacities 
are  better  organized  and  more  fully  brought  into  play. 
From  our  standpoint  we  are  to  regard  the  defects  of  nature 
and  the  defects  of  man  as  challenges  to  concerted  human 
effort,  by  which  the  human  values  already  caught  sight  of 
and  acknowledged  shall  be  enhanced  and  conserved  and, 
in  the  process,  new  and  richer  human  values  shall  be 
engendered. 

Teleological  idealism  does  not  imply  that  there  are  no 
forces  in  the  universe  hostile  to  the  achievement  or  con¬ 
servation  of  values.  It  does  mean  that  humanity  and  its 
values,  being  essential  features  of  a  universe,  which,  thus 
far,  is  humanistic  in  character,  may  endure  and  win  the 
victory.  Thus  it  is  a  rational  faith  in  human  values; 
rational ,  because  values  and  selves  are  the  offspring  of  the 
very  universe  in  which  reason  lives  and  works,  faith ,  be¬ 
cause  admittedly  we  can  see  but  a  little  way  and  that  not 
very  clearly,  along  the  pathway  of  humanity  in  its  course 
through  time. 

In  conclusion  it  may  not  be  amiss  to  note  the  bearing 
of  this  position  on  the  traditional  arguments  for  the  exist¬ 
ence  of  God.  The  ontological  argument — the  idea  of  God 


484 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


is  the  idea  of  a  perfect  being ;  the  idea  of  a  perfect  being 
involves  the  existence  of  snch  a  being ;  therefore  God  exists 
— is  nothing  more  than  the  putting  into  the  form  of  a 
syllogism  of  the  postulate  of  a  supreme  principle  or  ground 
of  values — the  perfect  being.  The  cosmological  argument 
— that  the  existence  of  the  world  implies  the  existence  of 
a  unitary  cause — has  no  religious  value,  except  in  so  far  as 
it  is  assumed  that  the  world  is  good  and,  therefore,  its 
values  must  have  a  single  source.  The  physicoteleological 
argument  or  argument  from  the  evidence  of  design  or  pur¬ 
pose  in  the  structure  and  process  of  nature  is  but  a  clumsy 
and  roundabout  way  of  stating  the  fundamental  postulate 
of  life,  morality,  science,  and  religion,  namely  that  values 
are  operative  and  controlling  principles  in  the  universal 
order. 


References 

*  Avey,  A.  E.,  j Readings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  XXVI. 
Bosanquet,  The  Value  and  Destiny  of  the  Individual. 

*  Hoffding,  The  Problems  of  Philosophy. 

*  Huxley,  T.  H.,  Evolution  and  Ethics. 

*  James,  The  Will  to  Believe,  and  A  Pluralistic  Universe. 
Leighton,  J.  A.,  Man  and  the  Cosmos,  Chapters  XXVIII, 

XXIX,  XXX,  XXXV,  XXXVII,  and  XXXVIII. 

*  Mill,  J.  S.,  Three  Essays  on  Religion. 

Munsterberg,  The  Eternal  Values. 

Nietzsche,  F.,  Works,  translated  by  A.  Title,  especially  Thus 
Spake  Zarathustra,  Beyond  Good  and  Evil,  and  Genealogy 
of  Morals. 

Rickert,  H.,  V om  System  der  Werte,  Logos,  Bd.  IV,  1913,  pp. 
295-327. 

*  Russell,  B.,  The  Free  Man’s  Worship,  in  Mysticism  and  Logic. 
Windelband,  W.,  Einleitung  in  die  Philosophie,  Pt.  II,  and 

History  of  Philosophy,  pp.  518-528  and  pp.  648-659. 

Works  on  Metaphysics  and  the  Philosophy  of  Religion  previ¬ 
ously  cited. 


CHAPTER  XXVIII 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  HISTORY 

I.  A  Sketch  of  Some  Leading  Philosophies  of  History 

The  philosophy  of  history  must  be  distinguished  from 
the  philosophical  study  of  history.  The  latter  consists  of 
reflection  upon  and  generalization  from  the  study,  either 
of  special  periods  of  history,  or  in  its  widest  form,  of  uni¬ 
versal  history.  Excellent  examples  of  philosophical  his¬ 
torians  are  Ranke,  Taine,  Lecky,  and  Burckhardt.  The 
philosophy  of  history  is  the  quest  for  a  determination  of 
the  right  standpoint  from  which  to  view  the  whole  activity 
of  man  as  an  historical  and  social  being.  What  does  the 
life  of  man,  as  an  historical  being,  mean?  What  ends  or 
values  does  the  historical  life  aim  at  and  achieve?  What 
is  the  worth,  the  purpose,  the  promise  of  man ’s  life  in  time 
on  the  earth?  Is  human  history,  as  the  successive  gen¬ 
erations  run  their  courses,  a  meaningless  and  futile  tale? 
Or  does  man  lay  foundations,  build  up  values,  partially 
see  and  achieve  ends  that  are  inherently  worthful,  how¬ 
ever  fragmentary  and  imperfect  their  fulfillment  at  any 
given  time  may  be  ?  Does  the  historical  life  of  man  imply 
the  further  progress  and  fruition  of  human  values?  Are 
justice,  rationality,  liberty,  humanity,  the  achievement  of 
fuller  individualitv  and  a  finer  social  order,  mere  dreams 
and  illusions  of  a  being  who  is  inexorably  and  uncon¬ 
sciously  driven  on  by  physical  and  economic  forces  alone? 
Or  does  history  show,  on  large  scale  patterns,  the  working 

out  of  ethical  and  rational  ends?  To  raise  such  auestions 

485 


486 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


is  to  indicate  that  the  philosophy  of  history  is  the  appli¬ 
cation  of  metaphysics  and  ethics  to  the  whole  spectacle  of 
man’s  temporal  life.  On  the  other  hand,  metaphysics  and 
ethics  are  enriched,  given  content,  endowed  with  body  and 
blood,  only  by  bringing  their  categories  down  into,  and 
putting  them  to  work  in,  the  concrete  life  of  man.  Meta¬ 
physics  and  ethics  must  draw  from  the  contemplation,  on 
a  wide  scale  and  in  sympathetic  manner,  of  the  march  of 
man  and  civilization  through  time,  fruitful  suggestions, 
materials,  and  points  of  view. 

The  germs  of  a  philosophy  of  history  are  to  be  found  in 
the  writings  of  Hebrew  prophecy  (in  Isaiah,  Amos,  Jere¬ 
miah,  Ezekiel,  and  others)  in  which  the  course  of  nations 
is  for  the  first  time  conceived  and  depicted  as  controlled  by 
the  one  divine,  governing  purpose.  Jehovah  is  the  ruler 
of  all  the  nations  and  he  judges  them  and  determines  their 
fates  in  accordance  with  the  eternal  principles  of  social 
righteousness  and  mercy,  which  are  the  expression  in 
human  society  of  his  holy  will.  Special  privileges  entail 
special  obligations  and  Jehovah  judges  and  allots  to  Israel 
its  historical  destiny  in  accordance  with  the  measure  of  its 
loyalty  to  the  laws  of  social  justice  and  loving  kindness, 
which  he  enunciates  through  the  mouths  of  his  prophets. 
In  this  connection  see  especially  Isaiah  40  :12  ff.,  42  :5  ff., 
45  :21-23,  Amos  9  :7,  and  the  whole  treatment  of  the  rela¬ 
tions  of  the  various  peoples  in  Isaiah,  Amos,  Micah,  and 
Jonah.  Israel  and  Judah  must  not  look  for  special  favors 
at  the  hands  of  Jehovah.  He  is  not  their  God  alone,  but 
the  God  of  the  whole  earth,  and,  indeed,  of  the  whole  uni¬ 
verse. 

This  prophetic  conception  of  the  moral  order  of  history, 
that  is,  of  the  course  of  historical  change  as  the  working 
out  of  cosmically .  effective  principles  of  social  or  ethical 
value,  was  their  solution  of  the  ethico-religious  problem 
which  confronted  a  group  of  great  thinkers  who  started 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  HISTORY 


487 


from  the  fundamental  postulate  of  an  ethical  and  social 
religion.  Jehovah  was  believed  to  stand  in  a  peculiar  rela¬ 
tion  to  the  people  to  whom  he  had  made  known  his  true 
character  and  who  had  accepted  him  by  an  act  of  vdll  (the 
covenant  relationship).  Now  political  disaster,  conquest, 
and  suffering  confront  the  chosen  people.  If  Jehovah  be, 
indeed,  the  ethical  will  who  rules  the  world,  these  disas¬ 
ters  must  be  the  consequence  of  Israel’s  disloyalty.  The 
prophets  have  no  difficulty  in  pointing  to  the  social  cor¬ 
ruption,  the  luxury,  sensuous  indulgence,  dishonesty,  and 
oppression,  that  are  rife  in  a  luxurious  state,  as  the  sins 
of  disloyalty,  the  continuance  in  which  brings  disaster 
because  the  Judge  of  all  the  earth  is  holy.  This  new  view 
of  the  nation’s  relation  to  Jehovah  carries  with  it  the  eth¬ 
ical  universalism  which  sees  in  the  vicissitudes  of  all  the 
nations  the  work  of  Jehovah’s  will.  Assyria  is  for  the 
time  the  rod  of  his  anger.  Cyrus,  the  Persian,  is  his  in¬ 
strument. 

The  prophetic  doctrine  of  a  providential  moral  order, 
ruling  the  course  of  history  and  having  its  consummation 
in  the  full  establishment  of  the  Kingdom  of  God,  is  taken 
over  and  further  developed,  in  the  light  of  the  belief  in 
Christ  as  the  fulfiller  of  the  prophetic  teaching,  by  the 
fathers  of  the  Christian  Church.  It  furnishes  the  means 
by  which  the  civilization  of  Greece  and  Rome  are  set  in 
their  relations  to  the  Hebrew-Christian  process  of  revela¬ 
tion  and  redemption.  St.  Paul  and  the  Author  of  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  philosophize  on  the  relation  of 
Hebraism  and  Gentilism  to  Christianity.  See,  in  this  con¬ 
nection,  St.  Paul’s  Epistles  to  the  Romans,  and  Galatians, 
Chapters  3  and  5,  and  Hebrews,  especially  Chapter  11. 

Justin  Martyr,  Irenaeus,  Tertullian,  and  especially 
Augustine,  carry  on  the  work  of  setting  the  history  of  the 
world  in  the  framework  of  the  Christian  religion  as  the 
final  revelation  of  God’s  purpose.  Augustine,  in  his  City 


488 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


of  God ,  formulates,  in  comprehensive  fashion,  for  medieval 
Christianity  the  whole  providential  order  of  history.  The 
goal  of  history  is  the  parousia  or  second  coming  of  Christ, 
which  will  mean  the  complete  establishment  of  the  King¬ 
dom  of  God  on  earth.  The  Christian  eschatology  or  doc¬ 
trine  of  last  things  thus  supplies  the  norm  for  the  judg¬ 
ment  of  historical  progress. 

The  Manicheans  and  Gnostics,  heretical  sects  in  the  early 
Christian  centuries,  conceived  the  historical  process  in 
thoroughly  dualistic  fashion  as  a  battle  of  the  gods,  a 
conflict  between  the  cosmic  powers  of  good  and  evil,  light 
and  darkness,  spirit  and  flesh.  This  dualistic  interpreta¬ 
tion  of  history  has  its  roots  in  the  dualism  of  the  Persian 
religion  and  in  the  metaphysical  and  ethical  dualism  of 
spirit  and  matter  which  is  so  prominent  a  feature  of  the 
later  Greek  and  Hellenistic-Roman  speculation,  especially 
in  the  Neoplatonic  school.  Augustine  was  profoundly  in¬ 
fluenced  by  it.  Augustine,  in  his  City  of  God,  maintains 
that  the  course  of  history  is  regulated  by  the  will  of  God, 
according  to  a  predetermined  plan.  Nevertheless,  man  is 
free,  and,  by  the  sin  of  Adam,  the  unity  of  the  race  was 
broken  into  two  societies — the  city  of  evil  or  selfwill  and 
the  city  of  God,  ruled  by  love.  The  race,  like  the  indi¬ 
vidual,  passes  through  three  periods  in  its  education — 
youth,  manhood,  and  mature  age.  The  end  of  history  will 
be  the  establishment  of  a  new  earth,  the  triumph  of  the 
city  of  God  when  the  number  of  the  elect  is  completed. 
Bossuet,  the  great  French  preacher,  in  the  seventeenth 
century  develops  a  similar  theory  of  history. 

The  great  philosophers  of  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth 
centuries  were  not  interested  in  history,  with  the  excep¬ 
tion  of  that  universal  genius,  Leibnitz,  who  in  this  respect, 
as  in  others,  is  beyond  his  time.  For  Hobbes,  Descartes, 
and  Spinoza,  and  their  followers,  the  norms  of  all  knowl¬ 
edge  are  mathematics  and  mechanics,  the  mathematics  of 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OP  HISTORY 


489 


the  physical  order.  For  Locke  and  Hume  the  chief  inter¬ 
est  lay  in  the  psychological  and  epistemological  analysis 
of  knowledge.  For  them,  too,  mathematics  was  the  high¬ 
est  and  exactest  kind  of  knowledge,  since  it  dealt  only 
with  the  relations  between  ideas.  The  notion  of  the  grad¬ 
ual  growth  of  evolution  of  human  institutions  was  foreign 
to  their  thinking.  Everything  social  and  human  was  con¬ 
ceived  to  be  a  deliberate  invention  of  reason  or  the  result 
of  a  voluntary  convention  or  conscious  contract.  This  atti¬ 
tude  is  not  entirely  true  of  Hume,  who,  in  his  Natural 
History  of  Religions,  did  employ  the  historical  method. 

The  first  thinkers  to  formulate  a  doctrine  of  historical 
progress  were  Turgot  (in  1750)  and  Condorcet  (in  1793). 
Turgot  conceives  history  as  the  life  of  humanity  progress¬ 
ing  towards  perfection,  by  the  gradual  elevation  of  man’s 
whole  nature — of  his  intelligence,  feelings,  economic  lot, 
and  social  order.  Mental  or  spiritual  progress  is  the  main¬ 
spring  of  history.  He  does  not  think  that  progress  moves 
at  a  uniform  pace  or  at  the  same  rate  in  all  directions. 
Condorcet  believes  in  the  perfectibility  of  man  through 
continuous  progress.  He  holds  the  next  steps  to  be  the 
establishment  of  equality  between  nations  and  individuals. 

J.  J.  Rousseau  (1712-1778)  challenged  the  whole  civi¬ 
lization  of  his  time.  He  held  (1)  that  human  nature  was 
originally  or  naturally  good;  (2)  that  it  had  been  cor¬ 
rupted,  and  misery,  vice,  and  crime  introduced  into  society, 
by  political  and  economic  inequality;  (3)  that  the  whole 
history  of  civilization  had  been  a  career  of  illusion,  suffer¬ 
ing,  and  crime,  resulting  from  the  oppression  of  the  poor 
and  weak  by  the  strong  and  unscrupulous;  (4)  therefore, 
social  authority  and  order  must  be  based  on  a  free  con¬ 
tract  in  which  the  social  or  general  will  shall  be  deter¬ 
mined  by  majority  rule.  The  end  of  social  order  is  the 
free  and  spontaneous  development  of  individuality,  subject 
to  the  good  of  all  as  determined  by  the  general  will.  Rous- 


490 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


seau  has  had  a  widespread  and  deep  influence  on  social 
and  political  thought,  in  England  and  America,  as  well  as 
in  France.  He  deeply  influenced  Kant  and  Fichte,  but 
the  general  course  of  German  political  thought  since  Hegel 
has  been  quite  different.  In  a  land  in  which,  until  the 
great  crash  came  in  the  autumn  of  1918,  bureaucratic  class 
rule  and  the  divine  rights  of  kings  and  yunkers,  seemed 
to  become  ever  more  firmly  seated  in  the  saddle,  Rousseau, 
the  gospeller  of  democracy  and  equality  of  opportunity, 
soon  went  out  of  fashion ;  indeed,  never  was  in  fashion. 

Kant  in  his  Ideas  Towards  a  Vniversal  History  did  not 
break  away  from  the  prevailing  type  of  unhistorical  ra¬ 
tionalism.  He  did,  however,  formulate  the  idea  of  prog¬ 
ress  toward  rationality;  as  did  also  Lessing  (1729-1781), 
who  conceived  the  historical  process  of  humanity  to  be  a 
gradual  progress  in  God’s  education  of  the  race  up  to  the 
goal,  which  is  full  recognition  of  the  religion  of  the  spirit 
and  love,  first  enunciated  in  the  Gospel  of  St.  John. 
Herder  (1744-1803)  in  his  Ideas  for  the  Philosophy  of  the 
History  of  Mankind  has  a  much  broader  conception.  He 
attempts  to  bring  the  whole  course  of  man’s  development  in 
time  under  the  conception  of  a  law  of  progress,  whose  goal 
is  the  rule  of  reason  and  love  in  human  society.  Herder 
takes  account  of  the  influence  of  geographical  and  climatic 
conditions  in  the  historical  developments  of  peoples,  and 
also  gives  a  place  to  the  operation  of  the  more  or  less 
unconscious  spirit  or  sold  of  a  people.  The  goal  of  his¬ 
tory  is  the  fulfillment  of  the  ideal  of  humanity;  that  is, 
the  harmonious  development  of  all  the  capacities  of  man 
into  rationality,  aesthetic  harmony,  social  freedom,  and 
love.  This  was  the  ideal  of  Goethe  and  Schiller,  too. 
Fichte  and  Hegel  agree  with  Lessing  and  Herder  in  con¬ 
ceiving  the  course  of  history  to  be  the  progressive  realiza¬ 
tion  in  human  society  of  rational  freedom  and  love.  The 
goal  of  man’s  earthly  life,  says  Fichte,  is  that  humanity, 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  HISTORY 


491 


in  all  its  relationships,  shall  direct  its  life  with  freedom 
and  in  accordance  with  reason.  Fichte,  too,  regards  the 
Johannine  Gospel  as  the  first  clear  enunciation  of  the  spir¬ 
itual  end  and  meaning  of  history.  Reason,  he  says,  works 
first  unconsciously  as  instinct,  then  externally  as  the  au¬ 
thority  of  custom  and  law,  and  finally,  inwardly  in  the 
complete  insight  of  conscious  and  rational  freedom. 
Fichte’s  doctrine  is  a  metaphysics  of  history  read  in  terms 
of  his  theory  of  ethical  values. 

Hegel’s  Philosophy  of  History  is  the  most  elaborately 
worked  out  metaphysics  of  history  produced  by  the  school 
of  absolute  idealism.  In  a  broad  sense,  Hegel’s  whole 
philosophy  is  historical,  an  evolutionary  idealism.  The 
dialectic  process  or  development  of  the  full  truth  and  mean¬ 
ings  of  things  through  the  ‘  ‘  might  of  the  negative  ’  ’ ;  that 
is,  the  impulse  resident  in  every  finite  thing  and  event  to 
pass  over  into  its  opposite,  and  for  the  opposites  to  be 
absorbed  into  a  higher  unity  in  which  opposition  again 
breaks  forth,  this  logic  of  passion ,  is  exemplified  on  the 
grand  scale  in  the  history  of  human  culture.  The  whole 
story  of  humanity  is  the  development  of  spirit  to  fully 
conscious  and  rational  freedom,  through  the  incessant 
breaking  forth,  and  reconciliation  on  a  higher  level,  of  the 
oppositions  inherent  in  the  movement  of  spirit  through  the 
finite  forms  of  reality.  Art,  politics,  and  religion,  all  pass 
through  this  dialectic  growth,  and  Hegel  threads  the  whole 
history  of  the  religious  and  political  institutions  of  the 
world  on  his  dialectic  framework.  The  meaning  of  human 
history  is  the  progressive  realization  of  the  consciousness 
of  rational  freedom  on  the  part  of  man.  Rational  freedom 
is  attained  when  there  is  a  recognition  of  the  complete 
harmony  of  the  will  of  the  individual  with  the  universal 
will  embodied  in  the  state.  It  is  identical  with  true  moral¬ 
ity,  for  this  consists  precisely  in  the  conscious  and  com¬ 
plete  acceptance  by  the  individual  self  of  the  rights  and 


492 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


duties  which  are  prescribed  to  him  by  the  whole  spirit  of 
the  state.  So  freedom  is  fully  realized  where  custom,  law, 
and  morality  are  wholly  harmonious.  It  is  in  the  state 
that  the  individual  life,  family  life,  and  the  life  of  civil 
society,  find  their  fulfillment.  History,  therefore,  begins 
and  ends  with  the  state. 

The  dialectic  of  history  is  the  struggle  of  the  succession 
of  state  ideas.  *  ‘  The  state  is  the  march  of  God  in  history.  ’  ’ 
“The  state  is  the  Divine  Idea  as  it  exists  on  earth.”  In 
it  are  found  the  union  of  morality  and  religion.  God  is 
the  absolute  reason  who  governs  the  world.  God  is  the 
world-spirit  who  realizes  his  idea  or  purpose  in  time.  In 
each  successive  great  epoch  of  history,  one  state  represents 
the  aspect  of  the  divine  idea  which  is  then  being  realized. 
The  struggle  between  states  is  the  struggle  between  stages 
of  the  idea. 

The  victorious  state  represents  a  higher  phase  of  the 
divine  idea  than  the  conquered  state.  For  example,  in 
the  ancient  oriental  empires  of  China  and  India  but  one 
man  is  free — the  ruler — and  he  is  capricious  and  despotic. 
The  subjects  do  not  know  that  they  are  free  subjects  and 
therefore  are  only  unconscious  subjects.  The  religions  of 
the  Orient,  especially  Brahmanism,  make  the  infinite  all 
and  man,  the  finite  individual,  nothing.  Thus  they  cor¬ 
respond  with  the  despotic  state  idea.  Greece  conquers  the 
oriental  world  because  Greece,  particularly  Athens,  rep¬ 
resents  a  higher  stage  in  the  consciousness  of  freedom  and 
individuality.  Some  men,  that  is  the  citizens,  are  free. 
Greece  gives  free  play  to  individuality,  and  her  religion  is 
the  religion  of  the  finite,  of  free  and  beautiful  individuali¬ 
ties  who  express  the  Greek  ideal  of  humanity.  But  Greece 
succumbs  because  she  does  not  attain  the  full  conscious¬ 
ness  of  the  identity  of  man  as  man  with  the  universal,  of  the 
finite  with  the  Infinite,  of  the  identity  of  the  individual 
spirit  with  the  spirit  of  the  social  order.  In  order  that 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  HISTORY 


493 


this  consciousness  of  the  universality  of  freedom  may  be 
achieved,  it  must  appear  in  the  form  of  abstract  univer¬ 
sality,  the  abstract  power  of  the  universal  state.  This  is 
the  Roman  Empire.  Christianity  infuses  into  the  Roman 
world  the  consciousness  of  the  identity  of  the  divine  and 
the  human,  the  infinite  and  the  finite,  in  its  doctrine  of  the 
God-Man.  Politically,  this  consciousness  is  realized  in  the 
modern  Germanic  world,  in  which  all  men  are  free  as  ra¬ 
tional  beings  who  find  the  substance  of  their  wills  in  the 
complete  but  free  and  rational  identification  of  their  sub¬ 
jective  or  personal  wills  with  the  universal  will  embodied 
in  the  organization  of  the  state,  in  which  they  cooperate 
as  rational  members.  Thus  the  goal  of  history  is  reached. 
What  remains  to  be  achieved  in  future  time,  Hegel  does 
not  indicate. 

The  great  personalities,  world  historical  individuals, 
statesmen,  conquerors,  and  rulers  are  the  chief  organs  of 
the  universal  will,  instruments  of  the  idea,  of  the  world 
spirit.  They  pursue  their  own  aims,  but  Reason  in  its 
cunning  uses  them  as  its  tools  to  further  its  unhasting  and 
unresting  movement. 

Hegel’s  conception  of  history  thus  differs  from  the  tra¬ 
ditional  Christian  conception  in  that  his  providence  is  a 
world  purpose  or  a  world  idea  that  is  the  wholly  immanent 
driving  force  that  operates  according  to  the  dialectic  or 
logic  of  history,  using  the  passions  and  wills  of  men,  the 
vicissitudes  of  empires  and  rulers,  to  achieve  full  conscious¬ 
ness  of  itself,  by  an  immanent  necessity  that  admits  nothing 
contingent,  nothing  that  can  arrest  its  resistless  progress. 
Hence,  the  course  of  history  is  the  majestic  progress  of 
the  true  and  the  good  in  and  through  all  the  error  and  the 
sin,  the  passion  and  pathos,  the  tragedy  and  comedy  of 
man’s  political  and  social  life.  The  Christian  view,  on  the 
other  hand,  regards  man  as  a  free  and  responsible  agent 


494 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


who  may  contravene,  although  he  cannot  finally  thwart, 
God’s  purposes  in  history. 

Hegel’s  Philosophy  of  History  is  a  combination  of 
philosophical  history,  in  which  the  facts  are  often  badly 
distorted  to  fit  his  scheme,  and  metaphysics  of  history. 
For  Hegel  history  is  the  resistless  and  inevitable  march  of 
the  absolute  idea  through  time,  until  it  becomes  fully  con¬ 
scious  of  itself  in  the  culture  of  the  modern  Germanic 
world  and  discovers,  in  the  Hegelian  philosophy,  what  it 
has  all  meant.  This  victorious  march  of  the  absolute 
through  time  is  the  metaphysical  ground  of  all  culture.  It 
is  the  progressive  realization  by  the  human  spirit  of  its 
identity  with  the  absolute  spirit,  which  consciousness  of 
itself  through  the  human  spirit  by  the  absolute  spirit  is 
the  full  and  true  meaning  of  freedom.  Karl  Marx,  the 
author  of  Das  Kapital,  the  socialistic  Bible,  stood  the 
Hegelian  philosophy  on  its  head  when  he  proclaimed  that 
the  march  of  the  absolute  through  time  is  the  march  of 
economic  necessity,  and  every  culture  factor,  every  ideolog¬ 
ical  motive  in  history,  is  but  a  sublimation  of  economic 
forces.  Marx,  in  a  one-sided  fashion,  thus  called  attention 
to  a  very  important  consideration  neglected  by  Hegel, 
namely  the  influence  of  economic  factors  in  determining 
the  course  of  man’s  historical  evolution.  The  economic  or 
materialistic  interpretation  of  history  has  become  almost 
a  commonplace  since  then ;  but  to  assert  that  economic  mo¬ 
tives  are  the  only  ones  that  rule  in  history  is  to  take  a  dis¬ 
torted  view  of  human  nature. 

Auguste  Comte  (1798-1857)  regards  historical  progress 
as  due  primarily  to  intellectual  causes.  There  are,  he  says, 
three  stages  in  man’s  intellectual  history.  In  the  earliest 
or  theological  stage,  man  explains  events  by  recourse  to 
spirits  (animism)  ;  in  the  second  or  metaphysical  stage, 
explanation  is  given  in  terms  of  abstract  metaphysical 
entities  (for  example,  to  explain  the  effects  of  opiates  as 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OP  HISTORY 


495 


due  to  a  “dormific”  capacity)  ;  in  the  third  or  positivistic 
stage,  of  which  Comte  was  the  herald,  man  concerns  him¬ 
self  only  with  formulating  the  correlations  between  phe¬ 
nomena,  to  the  end  that  he  may  establish  social  harmony 
and  well-being.  Comte  formulated  a  polity  for  the  posi¬ 
tivistic  society,  his  social  ideal,  in  which  altruism  as  the 
supreme  motive  and  the  detailed  regulation  of  social  life 
are  to  be  the  chief  factors.  The  goal  of  history  is  the  per¬ 
fection  of  man  in  society,  motivated  by  altruism  and  di¬ 
rected  by  positive  science.  Buckle,  the  English  historian, 
was  a  pioneer  in  showing  the  influence  of  physical  con¬ 
ditions  in  determining  the  course  of  history.  He  did  not, 
however,  deny  the  influence  of  mental  causes. 

Nearly  all  modern  systems  of  sociology  include  theories 
of  historical  progress.  Herbert  Spencer,  for  instance, 
elaborates  at  great  length  the  view  that  society  has  pro¬ 
gressed,  and  is  still  progressing,  from  militarism  with  cen¬ 
tralized  organization  towards  industrialism  with  political 
decentralization.  Some  sociologists,  such  as  Gumplowicz 
and  Ratzenhofer,  emphasize  the  struggles  of  races  and 
groups  for  political  domination  as  the  chief  cause  of  his¬ 
torical  change.  Much  use  has  been  made  of  the  evolution¬ 
ary  doctrines  of  struggle  for  existence  and  survival  of  the 
fittest  as  ruling  forces  in  historical  changes. 

Social  psychologists  or  psychological  sociologists,  of 
whom  there  are  many  to-day,  following  Wundt,  emphasize 
the  central  place  of  psychical  forces,  feelings,  and  volitions, 
in  historical  change.  Wundt  holds  that  the  philosophy  of 
history  is  applied  psychology.  There  are  social  psycho¬ 
logical  laws  or  principles  which  are  illustrated  by  the  facts 
of  history.  The  sociologists  in  general  hold  that  there  are 
laws  of  historical  change.  Thus  they  are  determinists. 
But  many  of  them  would  agree  with  Wundt  that  the  laws 
of  historical  causality  are  psychological  and  thus  differ 
from  physical  laws.  In  a  physical  process  there  is  quanti- 


496 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


tative  equivalence  between  cause  and  effect.  This  is  not  the 
case  in  the  psychical  sphere.  Here  the  effects  differ  quan¬ 
titatively  as  well  as  qualitatively  from  the  causes  (Wundt’s 
Law  of  the  Increase  of  Psychical  Energy). 

A  considerable  and  influential  number  of  writers  on  the 
logic  of  history,  chief  among  whom  may  be  mentioned 
Dilthey,  Windelband,  Rickert,  Simmel,  Troeltsch,  and 
Croce,  deny  that  there  are  historical  laws  even  remotely 
analogous  to  physical  laws.  They  hold  the  function  of 
history  to  be  the  description  and  interpretation  of  unique, 
nonrepeatable  occurrences.  The  subject  matter  of  history 
is  the  irreversible  series  of  unique  nonrepeatable  events 
that  constitute  the  historical  development  of  human  cul¬ 
ture.  History  does  not  repeat  itself  and  the  historian 
deals  with  individualities,  chiefly  the  individualities  of 
culture  groups,  epochs,  and  movements.  The  historian  em¬ 
ploys  general  concepts  and  makes  generalizations.  But 
these  are  teleological  concepts  or  concepts  of  value.  In  the 
selection  and  interpretation  of  historical  occurrences,  it  is 
not  merely  legitimate  but  inevitable  that  the  unique  mem¬ 
bers  of  historical  series  of  events  should  be  related  or  con¬ 
nected  into  a  systematic  interpretation,  and  this  relating 
takes  place  in  terms  of  values  or  teleological  principles  of 
action.  For  historical  events  are  the  expression  of  the 
clashing  and  cooperating  wills  of  men. 

II.  Problems  of  the  Philosophy  of  History 

I  will  now  briefly  indicate  the  problems  of  the  philoso¬ 
phy  of  history.  This  discipline  has  no  concern  with  the 
determination  of  the  facts  of  history  or  their  empirical  rela¬ 
tionships.  That  is  the  province  of  the  historian.  The  con¬ 
sideration  of  the  logical  processes  or  methods  and  principles 
of  historical  investigation  and  interpretation,  and  com¬ 
parison  of  them  with  the  methods  and  principles  of  natural 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  HISTORY 


497 


science  constitute  the  Logic  of  History,  an  important  divi¬ 
sion  of  logical  inquiry.  Inasmuch  as  the  principles  of 
logic  have  the  closest  connection  with  metaphysics,  the 
logic  of  history  is  intimately  associated  with  the  Meta¬ 
physics  of  History.  In  the  latter  field,  the  chief  questions 
are  the  following :  First,  the  determination  of  the  system 
of  human  values  or  standards  of  judgment,  in  the  light  of 
which  philosophy  can  intelligently  weigh  the  questions  as 
to  the  fact  and  character  of  human  progress,  the  growth 
of  culture  or  civilization.  The  general  problem  of  progress 
falls  into  several  divisions — the  problem  of  the  nature  and 
facts  of  moral  progress,  political  progress,  economic  prog¬ 
ress,  intellectual  progress,  religious  progress,  and  their 
interrelationships. 

In  the  consideration  of  the  problem  of  progress  there  are 
tv7o  chief  factors  to  be  taken  into  account;  first,  the  orig¬ 
inal  or  biological  nature  of  man.  Is  human  nature  modi¬ 
fiable  through  the  inheritance  of  acquired  characteristics? 
Man ’s  inherited  nature  is  an  original  datum  for  all  theories 
of  progress  and  practical  efforts  towards  progress.  The 
members  of  every  living  generation  set  out  upon  their  social 
careers  with  about  the  same  fixed  capital  of  native  im¬ 
pulses  and  powers.  There  is  no  evidence  of  any  natural 
increase  in  the  native  capacities  of  men.  Thus,  as  civi¬ 
lization  growrs  more  complex  it  increases  the  strain  on  the 
human  organism.  Unless  the  increased  tension  be  relieved 
by  improved  cultural  methods,  civilization  disintegrates. 
This  has  often  happened ;  very  likely  it  will  happen  again. 
The  changes  in  the  way  of  improvement  and  decline  in 
the  character  of  the  social  inheritance  or  cultural  com¬ 
plexes,  into  w7hich  the  generations  are  born  and  by  which 
they  are  nurtured,  is  the  second  factor  in  estimating  prog¬ 
ress.1 


i  I  use  the  term  “culture”  here,  in  a  broad  sense,  to  include  all 
the  products  of  human  thought,  imagination,  invention,  and  organ- 


498 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


The  formulation  of  the  system  of  values  is  the  critical 
problem  of  ethics.  Thus  the  philosophy  of  history  must 
rest  on  ethics.  On  the  other  hand,  the  study  of  history 
furnishes  material  for  ethics.  There  is  here  a  logical  cir¬ 
cle.  History  is  interpreted  and  judged  in  terms  of  a  sys¬ 
tem  of  ethical  values  which,  in  turn,  are  derived  from 
history.  There  is  no  escape  from  the  circle.  The  philoso¬ 
pher  must  simply  do  his  best  to  attain  the  fullest  possible 
objectivity  by  the  fairest,  widest  and  most  penetrating 
survey  of  the  facts  of  cultural  evolution.  The  questions 
— wherein  does  progress  consist,  and  has  it  taken  place 
or  is  it  now  going  on — can  be  answered  only  in  terms  of 
a  theory  of  human  values.  It  is  absurd  to  dispute  about 
progress,  if  we  do  not  know  what  we  are  talking  about ; 
and  we  do  not  know,  until  we  have  formulated  a  compre¬ 
hensive  and  coherent  philosophy  of  the  true  values  and 
ends  of  human  existence. 

In  the  past  those  who  have  speculated  on  the  meaning 
of  history  have  usually  judged  the  facts  from  the  stand¬ 
point  of  a  standard  of  valuation  arbitrarily  assumed  or 
deduced  from  some  theological  or  metaphysical  belief  in 
regard  to  the  absolute  or  supreme  values  to  be  served  or 
won  by  man.  Now,  a  candid  and  searching  examination 
of  the  types  of  judgment,  the  conceptions  of  the  good,  or 
the  values  to  be  pursued  by  civilized  man,  as  these  are  re¬ 
vealed  in  man’s  social,  political,  and  religious  deeds  and 
aspirations  and  are  expressed  in  his  literatures  and  philoso¬ 
phies,  will  show  that  there  has  been  change,  growth  with 
improvement  in  certain  directions,  perhaps  retrogression 
in  others.  The  ideals  of  a  Greek  gentleman,  as  reflected 
in  Plato  and  Aristotle,  differ  quite  markedly  from  those 


ization,  that  enter  into,  and  are  transmitted  by,  the  stream  of 
social  life  as  it  passes  from  generation  to  generation.  Thus  culture 
includes  all  physical  discoveries  and  inventions,  no  less  than  art, 
science,  morals,  and  religion. 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  HISTORY 


499 


of  the  best  Hebrews  of  Isaiah’s  day  or  of  a  Greek  Chris¬ 
tian  or  a  medieval  Christian.  The  ideas  or  values  of  life 
for  a  medieval  Christian  are  quite  different  from  those  of 
an  eighteenth  century  philosopher  and  of  a  twentieth  cen- 
turv  American.  The  ideals  and  values  of  the  latter  differ 
from  those  of  a  good  Chinaman  or  Burmese. 

A  doctrine  of  ethical  and  social  values  or  norms  of  con¬ 
duct  and  social  organization,  which  shall  be  clear  sighted 
and  well-rounded,  must  be  based  on  a  critical  and  sympa¬ 
thetic  examination  of  the  principal  ideals  of  life  in  their 
historical  evolution.  The  doctrine  of  ethical  values  or 
goods  is  really  a  distillation  or  sublimation  of  the  dynamic 
trend,  the  driving  purport,  of  the  history  of  man’s  inner 
or  spiritual  civilization.  The  attempt  to  construct  such 
a  system  by  abstract  rationalizing  or  even  psychologizing 
can  only  result  in  a  distorted  skeleton. 

Ethics  cannot  be  based  simply  on  psychology.  For  the 
norms  of  conduct,  which  issue  demands  to  the  will  of  the 
individual  and  which  shape  his  congenital  tendencies,  are 
the  products  of  the  evolution  of  social  culture.  These 
norms  live  and  operate,  without  systematic  self-conscious¬ 
ness,  in  the  social  atmosphere  in  which  the  individual  lives. 
The  task  of  ethics  is,  by  historical  and  sociological  analysis 
and  philosophical  construction,  to  disengage  them  from 
the  mass  of  tradition  and  custom  and  to  organize  them 
into  a  coherent  whole. 

Only  when  this  has  been  done  have  we  a  clear  and  self- 
conscious  standpoint  from  which  to  judge  the  facts  of 
history.  Without  a  systematic  theory  of  moral  values 
educed,  by  constructive  analysis,  from  the  systematic  study 
of  the  moral  history  of  humanity,  judgments  in  regard  to 
the  purport  of  history  can  be  nothing  better  than  the  ex¬ 
pression  of  inherited  beliefs,  personal  prejudices,  and  sub¬ 
jective  emotional  reactions. 

Inasmuch  as  the  historically  grounded  and  systemat- 


500 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


ically  organized  doctrine  of  ethical  value-judgments  re¬ 
mains  as  yet  largely  unachieved  for  contemporary  society, 
a  society  in  transition,  it  cannot  be  said  that  we  have  the 
instruments  ready  at  hand  for  formulating  a  philosophy 
of  history.  And  yet,  if  man  is  to  guide  his  further  efforts 
towards  a  better  social  order  and  greater  individual  well¬ 
being  in  the  clear  daylight  of  an  enlightened  and  instructed 
intelligence,  a  philosophy  of  history  is  much  to  be  desired. 
Certainly  the  struggles  and  confusions  of  the  present,  the 
cataclysmic  upheavals  in  the  whole  social  and  political 
fabric  of  western  civilization,  constitute  an  urgent  call  to 
scholars  and  philosophers  to  devote  themselves  to  the  task 
of  clarifying  and  organizing  human  convictions  on  the 
true  ends  of  human  life,  the  true  values  to  be  aimed  at 
and  achieved  by  our  social  order.  We  must  not  go  it 
blindly.  We  must  seek  with  all  our  power,  and  with  all 
the  light  available,  to  formulate  an  ethical  philosophy  of 
history.  Statecraft,  education,  industrial  society,  stand 
in  urgent  need  of  just  this  guidance.  In  this  sense 
philosophy  is  called  upon  to  be  an  interpreter  of  history 
and  a  guide  to  the  life  of  man  in  society.  The  need  of 
a  broader  based,  and  more  profoundly  conceived,  social 
ethics  is  clamant. 

In  the  second  place,  assuming  that  we  have  attained  a 
system  of  ethical  values,  a  normative  standpoint  from  which 
to  estimate  the  relative  worths  of  the  various  stages  and 
factors  of  historical  change ;  in  other  words,  that  we  have 
arrived  at  clearly  defined  standards  of  progress  and  apply 
our  standards  to  the  factual  order  of  history;  a  candid 
examination  of  the  latter  order  up  to  the  present  moment 
will  compel  the  admission  that  there  is  but  scant  evidence 
that  mankind,  taken  as  a  whole,  is  surely  moving  towards 
one  universal  goal  or  end.  The  course  of  historical  change 
is  exceedingly  complex  and  confusing.  Certain  peoples  are 
stationary  for  long  periods.  Others,  such  as  the  extreme 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  HISTORY  501 

Orient  and  the  Occident,  lived  for  many  centuries  without 
influencing  one  another.  Now  that  the  oriental  and  occi¬ 
dental  civilizations  are  in  closer  contact,  it  is  not  clear 
what  the  issue  of  this  meeting  will  be.  Even  Occidental 
civilization  does  not  show  steady  progress  in  all  directions. 
It  halts  and  even  retrogrades.  Who  would  assert  that  the 
recent  World  War  was  not  followed  by  profound  ethical 
retrogression?  The  occidental  man  does  not  seem  to  have 
mastered  the  vast  industrial  mechanism  which  he  has  evoked 
from  the  forces  of  nature  to  do  his  bidding.  The  monster 
he  has  created  threatens  to  engulf  the  finer  spirit  of  life. 

Moreover,  were  it  clear  that  moral  and  humane  progress 
goes  on  even  through  the  welter  of  industrialism,  commer¬ 
cialism  and  war,  who  are  to  enjoy  the  final  fruits  of  the 
movement?  Is  it  the  lot  of  the  living  members  of  each 
generation  simply  to  toil  and  suffer  and  achieve  somewhat, 
in  order  to  hand  on  to  the  following  generation  a  heritage 
of  instruments  and  a  nest  of  problems,  with  and  at  which 
that  generation,  in  turn,  will  labor,  to  pass  to  the  grave  and 
be  forgotten  after  a  brief  toil  at  an  endless  task ;  one  which 
is  never  done,  but  continues  and  changes  throughout  the 
centuries  and  the  Eeons  without  final  goal,  without  enduring 
results  in  human  values?  Either  humanity,  as  it  toils  in 
history,  is  engaged  in  an  endless  and  goalless  task  and 
progress  is  a  self-contradictory  notion ;  or  the  goal  is  to  be 
reached  by  some  far  off  generation,  and  then  all  the  pre¬ 
ceding  generations  will  have  been  mere  hewers  of  wood 
and  drawers  of  water  to  serve  the  welfare  of  the  final 
happy  one ;  or  there  is,  in  the  lives  of  each  generation,  as  it 
toils  and  suffers  and  aspires  in  the  living  present,  an 
inherent  value  and  then,  since  this  value  is  only  in  part 
achieved  by  it,  must  we  not  postulate,  if  our  ethical  and 
humane  values  are  to  retain  their  validity  and  dignity,  a 
continuous  existence  and  progressive  fulfillment  of  value 
for  the  life  of  man  beyond  the  visible  bournes  of  the  present 


502 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


time  and  space  ?  Does  not  the  supremacy  of  ethical  values 
imply  the  immortality  of  the  generations  ? 

Furthermore,  while  the  individual  lives  a  worthy  life 
only  in  so  far  as  he  cooperates  manfully  in  the  social  work 
of  his  own  day  and  place  as  a  member  of  the  community, 
the  nation,  the  group,  in  which  his  calling  and  election 
give  him  membership  and,  in  the  widest  sense,  in  the  work 
of  humanity,  the  individual  life  which  alone  feels,  thinks 
and  wills,  alone  knows  the  bitterness  of  defeat,  the  joy  of 
achievement,  alone  feels  the  sorrow  and  the  happiness  of 
the  common  human  lot,  is  the  actual  agent  and  embodiment 
of  ethical  values.  How,  then,  can  ethical  values  endure 
and  grow  if  individual  souls  are,  in  the  final  outcome,  but 
dust  and  ashes  thrown  on  the  cosmical  scrap-heap  by  the 
winds  and  tides  of  the  blind  cosmical  weather  ? 

Thus,  the  final  issues  raised  by  ethics  and  the  philosophy 
of  history  are  the  issues  that  lie,  and  have  always  lain,  at 
the  heart  of  man ’s  whole  practical  and  affective  life.  These 
are  the  issues  out  of  which  arise  the  cry  for  a  religious 
world  view,  and  assuring  answers  to  which  the  genius  of 
religion  aims  and  has  always  aimed  to  give.  For.  religion, 
at  its  best,  is  the  consecration  of  the  highest  human  values ; 
it  is  the  affirmation  in  faith  and  deed  that  these  values  are 
integral  constituents  in,  or  essential  qualities  of,  the  univer¬ 
sal  and  enduring  order;  that  the  higher  meanings  and 
purposes  of  the  human  spirit  are  blood  kin  to  the  supreme 
meaning  and  purpose  of  reality. 

An  interesting  and  important  application  of  these  prob¬ 
lems  arises  in  connection  with  the  ethics  of  the  state,  the 
most  comprehensive  and  powerful  form  of  social  organiza¬ 
tion.  What  ends  does  and  should  the  state  exist  to  serve? 
Is  there  discernible,  in  the  light  of  ethical  values,  any  line 
of  political  progress  in  history  ?  Should  the  state  be  ordered 
so  as  to  promote  primarily  the  universal  self-realization  of 
the  mass  of  mankind,  to  enable  all  individuals  to  attain  and 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  HISTORY 


503 


enjoy  a  fair  measure  of  physical  and  mental  well-being"? 
If  so,  what  is  a  fair  measure  of  well-being?  Should  the 
means  to  develop  and  exercise  exceptional  abilities  and 
achieve  distinguished  results  be  denied  the  comparatively 
few  in  the  interest  of  a  moderate  average  of  well-being  for 
all?  Or  are  both  aims  possible  of  realization?  In  short, 
can  the  democratic  and  the  aristocratic  ideals  of  social  order 
be  reconciled  ?  If  so,  how  ?  Which  is  more  nearly  in  accord 
with  the  highest  ethical  values,  well-being  and  enjoyment 
made  cheap  and  accessible  to  everyone,  or  a  political  and 
industrial  organization  that  aims  primarily  at  producing 
the  highest  results  in  art,  science,  literature  ?  Or  can  these 
two  ideals  be  realized  simultaneously  in  the  same  social 
order?  To  seek  an  answer  to  these  questions  is  to  formu¬ 
late  a  system  of  ethical  values  by  which  history  and  the 
present  social  and  political  orders  are  judged. 

Or  are,  perhaps,  the  Buddhist,  the  Neoplatonist,  the 
quietist,  the  contemplative  mystic,  right  in  holding  that  the 
only  permanent  peace,  the  only  lasting  values,  are  to  be 
attained  by  escaping  from  the  roaring  loom  of  time  to  the 
calm  haven  of  unruffled  contemplation  and  mystic  union 
with  the  one  changeless  absolute  in  whose  presence  all  the 
fretful  stir  unprofitable  and  the  fever  of  this  jarring  world 
are  seen  to  be  illusion  ? 

III.  Causes  and  Criteria  of  Progress 

Anyone  who  has  considered  carefully  the  historical  spec¬ 
tacle  will  admit  that  all  theories  of  historical  evolution 
or  progress  that  reduce  the  course  of  history  to  some  simple 
formula  of  a  necessary  sequence,  whether  it  be  an  idealistic 
determination  like  Hegel’s,  or  Comte’s  law  of  the  three 
stages,  economic  determinism  like  Marx,  or  one  of  the  more 
recent  and  equally  grandiose  sociological  theories,  are  false 
to  the  complexity  and  richness  of  the  facts.  Certain  broad 


504 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


lines  of  tendency  or  general  direction  can  be  traced  in  the 
historical  movement  of  man,  but  these  lines  are  neither 
straight,  nor  regular  spirals  nor  even  regular  zigzags. 
They  are  wobbly.  The  general  tendencies  are  subject  to 
arrest,  diversion,  and  retroversion.  It  may  be  that,  if  one 
knew  enough,  one  would  see  that  the  historical  order  is  an 
absolutely  predetermined  sequence.  But,  then,  no  one 
knows  enough  to  enable  him  to  establish  this.  The  only 
relatively  constant  factors  in  history  are  the  primal  needs 
and  impulses  of  the  natural  man  and  the  general  character 
of  his  physical  environment.  But,  as  civilization  advances, 
the  fixity  of  the  environmental  conditions  of  life  decreases 
through  increased  social  control  of  nature.  Man  continues 
to  be  hungry  and  thirsty,  to  acquire  and  to  construct  things, 
to  love  and  hate ;  to  engender  his  kind,  to  seek  the  company 
of  his  fellows  and  to  quarrel  with  them;  but  with  more 
complicated  instruments  and  in  more  numerous  and  effec¬ 
tive  ways,  as  his  social  heritage  of  invention,  knowledge,  and 
organization  increases  in  complexity.  Moreover,  as  man 
has  evolved  in  civilization,  he  has  acquired  increased  power 
of  self-determination  and  self-direction.  This  principle  of 
human  evolution  in  itself  seems  to  negative  the  assumption 
that  a  complete  body  of  necessary  laws  of  historical  evolu¬ 
tion  could  be  framed. 

I  propose  to  outline,  very  briefly,  a  theory  of  the  criteria 
of  progress.  Before  doing  so  it  may  be  well  to  summarize 
the  chief  forces  that  operate  in  history.  These  are :  1. 
Physicogeographical  forces — climate,  soil,  contour,  and  fer¬ 
tility  of  the  land,  and  facility  of  communication  and  trans¬ 
portation  are  powerful  factors  in  moulding  the  character  of 
a  civilization.  Consider  the  fact  that  the  Nile  valley  and 
Mesopotamia  are  probably  the  earliest  seats  of  a  continuous, 
long  enduring  and  highly  developed  civilization  in  the  west, 
and  that  Chinese  civilization  grew  up  in  river  valleys. 
Consider  the  influence  of  the  Mediterranean  and  of  the 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  HISTORY 


505 


Temperate  Zone  in  the  Northern  Hemisphere  on  the  course 
of  European  civilization!  But,  as  civilization  advances  in 
the  technological  control  of  nature,  these  physical  factors 
become  subordinated  and  cease  to  play  the  dominant  role. 
Man  has  in  part  conquered  the  natural  factors.  He  has 
discovered  how  to  protect  himself  against  inclement  climates 
and  to  utilize  apparently  unfruitful  soils  and  useless 
minerals. 

2.  Economic  forces.  The  course  of  historical  change  is 
very  largely  a  consequence  of  the  struggle  for  food  and 
creature  comforts.  “While  the  philosopher  talks,  hunger 
and  love  rule  the  world.  ’  ’  The  migrations  and  expansions 
of  peoples  are  due  largely  to  economic  needs  and  lusts. 
This  was  true  of  the  barbarian  invasions  and,  in  lesser 
degree,  of  the  European  expansion  in  America.  So,  too, 
the  class  struggles  between  masters  and  slaves,  lords  and 
serfs,  exploiters  and  exploited,  and,  to-day,  between  capital¬ 
ists  and  proletariat,  are  based  in  part  on  economic  motives. 
I  say  in  part ,  for  I  hold  that,  above  the  level  of  the  lowest 
savage,  the  most  powerful  motive  that  impels  men  to  social 
change  is  the  desire  for  self-determination.  Consequently, 
the  economic  motives  are  interwoven  with  other  and  more 
ideational  factors. 

3.  Idea-Forces.  Riding  ideas  are  those  which  dominate 
the  members  of  a  group  or  people  in  any  age.  As  civiliza¬ 
tion  develops,  in  mental  and  social  complexity,  ruling  ideas 
become  more  powerful  factors  in  social  life.  Consider  the 
conception  of  a  covenant  relationship  with  the  righteous 
ruler  of  the  universe  as  the  ruling  idea  of  Jewish  group 
solidarity,  the  supremacy  of  the  spiritual  order  as  the  ruling 
idea  in  the  Catholic  middle  ages,  the  ideas  of  liberty, 
equality  and  fraternity  in  the  French  revolution,  and  the 
power  of  such  ideas  as  democracy,  social  justice,  equality  of 
opportunity  to-day!  Ideas  are  increasingly  potent  factors 
in  social  life,  as  society  becomes  more  diversified  and  highly 


506  THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 

organized  in  its  activities  and  as  education  becomes  more 
universal. 

4.  Great  Men.  One  does  not  need  to  be  an  orthodox 
Carlylean  to  see  that  great  men  are  potent  historical  forces, 
as  military  leaders  and  chiefs  of  marauding  hordes  and 
peoples,  as  rulers,  legislators,  and  statesmen,  as  inventors, 
discoverers,  prophets,  reformers,  artists,  teachers.  Often 
a  social  movement  has  been  turned  aside  from  its  original 
aims  by  the  dominating  power  of  a  leader.  Napoleon  I  and 
the  French  Revolution  are  the  classic  instances  here.  Often 
a  social  movement  fails  to  fulfill  its  pristine  promise  for  lack 
of  effective  leadership.  It  has  been  argued  that  great  men 
are  creatures  of  their  environment  and,  in  opposition  to 
this,  that  the  great  man  moulds  his  social  environment  after 
his  own  will.  Both  views  are  false.  The  greatest  man  is 
limited  and  moulded  by  his  environment ;  but,  in  turn, 
by  taking  the  leadership  and  directing  the  forces  in  his 
environment,  he  may  produce  great  changes  and  stamp 
society  with  the  impress  of  his  personality.  It  has  been 
said  by  some  that  the  influence  of  the  leader  is  decreasing 
in  modern  industrial  and  literate  democracy.  This  seems 
doubtful.  It  is  now  harder  to  maintain  a  position  of  leader¬ 
ship  for  long,  but  the  facts  seem  to  indicate  that  the  oppor¬ 
tunity  for  leadership  has  not  decreased  with  the  increase 
in  the  proportion  of  literate  members  of  society,  and  in 
the  complexity  of  its  economic  structure.  In  fact,  the  need 
for  experts  to  lead  and  direct  its  complex  social  forces 
becomes  greater  than  ever. 

5.  The  Cultural -Psychological  Forces.  By  these  I  mean 
the  whole  social  heritage,  which  is  constantly  being  added 
to  in  the  movement  of  culture.  This  includes  inventions 
and  discoveries  and  changes  in  the  industrial,  economic,  and 
political  orders,  spread  of  education  and  knowledge, 
changes  in  laws  and  rules  of  conduct,  changes  in  ideals  of 
conduct  and  religion,  changes  in  art  and  letters.  The 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  HISTORY 


507 


cultural-psychological  forces  include  the  effects  of  increased 
scientific  control  over  nature,  economic  factors  and  the 
influence  of  great  men  in  building  up  and  reshaping  the 
institutions  and  beliefs  of  society,  as  well  as  the  vast  and 
subtle  changes  wrought  in  the  social  texture  by  the  constant 
and  often  silent  reactions  of  the  masses  of  human  beings. 

The  statement  of  criteria  of  progress  involves  a  definition 
of  civilization.  But  civilization  exists  only  in  the  civilizing 
process  which  is  progress.  Hence,  a  definition  of  progress 
is  a  definition  of  civilization. 

More  specifically,  we  may  say  that  progress  consists — (1) 
In  the  increasing  humanization  of  nature ,  through  improve¬ 
ment  in  man’s  technic  in  science  and  industry.  Since 
material  progress  is  the  humanization  of  nature,  it  follows 
that  any  industrial  system  in  which  man  is  dehumanized, 
by  being  treated  as  a  mere  tool  for  turning  out  material 
products,  vitiates  the  first  principle  of  progress.  Genuine 
progress  is  not  possible,  in  so  far  as  part  of  mankind  is 
ruthlessly  sacrificed  in  the  process  of  turning  out  more 
material  instruments  of  progress.  Progress  consists — (2) 
In  the  increasing  humanization  of  man.  By  this  I  mean 
the  enrichment  of  man  in  society,  through  the  enhanced 
opportunity  to  exercise  the  distinctly  human  capacities  for 
their  own  sakes — opportunity  to  satisfy  feeling,  in  the 
relations  of  love  and  friendship,  and  the  enjoyment  of  art 
and  nature ;  opportunity  to  satisfy  thought,  in  the  study 
of  literature,  history,  and  science ;  opportunity  to  satisfy 
the  constructive  and  other  active  impulses,  either  in  his 
work  or  leisure  hours.  This  humanizing  process  will  pro¬ 
duce  a  higher  type  of  religion  and  philosophical  attitude 
— -an  attitude  of  reverent  and  joyful  contemplation  of  the 
universe  as  the  expression  of  one  divine  life. 

There  are  certain  great  and  central  moral  conditions 
or  elements  of  progress.  There  are  (1)  Justice,  (2)  Liberty 
and  (3)  Opportunity.  These  are  really  three  aspects  of 


508 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


one  principle — the  humanization  of  man.  A  few  words  of 
comment  thereon  and  I  am  done. 

1.  Justice.  The  ideal  end  of  justice,  as  it  has  become 
clarified  in  the  historical  process,  through  the  work  of 
legislators,  ethicists,  and  religionists,  the  ideal  end  working 
from  primitive  custom,  through  Hebrew  and  Roman  Law 
and  the  progress  of  Anglo-Saxon  law  and  the  growth  of 
political  freedom,  is  this — the  progressive  discovery  and 
recognition  of  the  right  of  every  normal  human  being  to 
be  treated  as  a  self-determining  individual ,  as  a  rational 
self ,  free  and  responsible.  Henley’s  words 

I  am  the  master  of  my  Fate, 

I  am  the  Captain  of  my  Soul 

express  the  basic  and  elemental  condition  of  the  very  being 
of  selfhood  or  personality.  Thus  the  dynamic  principle 
in  the  evolution  of  the  concept  of  justice  is  the  emergence 
and  universalization  of  the  ideal  of  moral  personality.  The 
development  of  the  idea  of  legal  responsibility,  as  dependent 
upon  voluntary  choice  or  moral  responsibility,  and  of 
equality  before  the  law,  and  the  doctrine  of  the  natural  or 
inalienable  rights  of  man,  are  all  expressions  of  this  central 
principle.  The  recognition  of  the  moral  equality  of  all 
human  beings,  of  the  equal  right  of  all  human  beings,  as 
free  and  responsible  agents,  the  right  of  every  self  to  the 
opportunities  to  become  and  live  as  a  rational  self,  is  the 
moral  essence  of  democracy. 

2.  Liberty.  Progress  in  the  recognition  of  individual 
liberty  or  freedom  keeps  step  by  step  with  justice.  For 
justice  and  libertj7  are  two  aspects  of  the  same  ethical 
principle.  Liberty  is  the  sphere  or  scope  of  the  exercise 
of  individual  freedom,  of  self-direction  in  society,  in  so 
far  as  such  exercise  is  compatible  with  the  exercise  of  a 
like  freedom  on  the  part  of  all  the  other  members  of 
society.  In  a  primitive  society  a  man’s  liberty  of  action 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  HISTORY 


509 


and  thought  is  very  circumscribed — is  hedged  about  by 
customs  of  all  descriptions.  As  civilized  states  developed, 
and  law  became  formulated  in  general  principles,  and  was 
made  more  responsive  to  the  ideal  demands  of  equity, 
liberty  of  action  and  speech  increased.  But  it  was  not 
until  very  modern  times  that  the  right  to  freedom  of 
speech  and  opinion  in  matters  of  scientific  and  religious 
belief  "was  recognized.  It  is  now,  in  principle  at  least, 
admitted  in  democratic  states  that  intellectual  or  spiritual 
liberty,  as  well  as  political  and  religious  liberty  of  associa¬ 
tion,  is  a  logical  sequence  of  justice. 

One  form  of  liberty  has  been  circumscribed  rather  than 
furthered  with  some  members  of  society,  possibly,  through 
the  development  of  the  large  scale  of  industry — the  liberty 
to  earn  a  living.  The  enmeshment  of  the  individual  in 
the  vast  and  intricate  network  of  the  modern  industrial 
system  often  hinders  him  greatly  in  the  exercise  of  eco¬ 
nomic  self-determination  or  freedom.  And  spiritual  lib¬ 
erty,  too,  is  greatly  hindered  by  economic  serfdom.  The 
next  great  step  in  social  progress  will  be  to  establish  a 
fuller  measure  of  economic  liberty.  This  is  implied  in  the 
demand  for  fuller  opportunity.  For  a  fair  measure  of  eco¬ 
nomic  freedom  is  the  necessary  condition  for  the  exercise  of 
opportunity  for  self-development. 

3.  Opportunity.  If  the  nature  of  progress  be  such 
as  I  have  sketched,  it  follows  that  a  fair  opportunity  to 
become  and  live  as  a  full  and  free  moral  agent  is  the  logical 
sequence  of  justice  and  liberty.  For  such  opportunity  is 
part  and  parcel  of  our  supreme  standard  of  progress,  which 
may  be  summed  up  as  follows :  Progress  consists  in  the 
control  of  nature  and  the  improvement  of  social  institu¬ 
tions  to  the  end  that  every  human  being  shall  enjoy  a 
reasonable  opportunity  to  enter  into  the  use  of  the  full 
cultural  heritage  of  the  race,  and  by  using  it,  to  develop 
and  enjoy  his  own  inherent  capacities ,  so  that  thereby  he 


510 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


may  become,  in  the  measure  which  these  capacities  admit , 
a  rational,  free,  full,  aiid  harmonious  personality. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  contention  that  equalization  of 
opportunity  implies  absolute  economic  equality  has  no 
foundation  in  ethics,  psychology,  or  biology.  Ethically, 
the  individual  is  entitled  to  so  much  opportunity  as  he 
can  use.  From  the  standpoint  of  biology  and  psychology 
there  is  an  inherent  and  irrevocable  basis  of  inequality. 
Human  beings  are  not  born  either  with  equal,  or  even 
nearly  equal,  mental  and  physical  capacities.  On  the 
other  hand,  there  is  at  present  no  even  fairly  constant 
relation  between  the  economic  status,  into  which  an  indi¬ 
vidual  is  born,  and  his  congenital  abilities.  Social  prog¬ 
ress  will  depend  chiefly  on  the  degree  in  which  the 
economic  life  of  society  is  so  ordered  that  the  individual 
shall  have  a  full  opportunity  to  develop  and  exercise  his 
native  abilities.  To  say  that  such  is  the  case  now  is  to  be 
false  to  the  facts.  Here  is  the  heart  of  the  social  problem. 
Social  institutions  should  be  organized  so  as  to  remove,  as 
far  as  possible,  the  hindrances  to  the  development  of 
personality  that  are  due  to  economic  handicaps,  thus  leav¬ 
ing  free  play  to  the  natural  and  uncontrollable  source  of 
individuality  and  inequality,  the  reproductive  process, 
which  is  a  re-creative  process.  The  solid  and  lasting  prog¬ 
ress  of  man  in  the  future,  as  in  the  past,  will  depend  on 
the  liberation  and  activation  of  free  creative  individuality, 
of  dynamic  personality.  The  average  man  will  never  get 
far  beyond  the  satisfaction  of  his  belly  needs  without 
superaverage  persons  to  find  the  ways  of  progress  and  show 
them  to  him.  If  democracy  be  interpreted  to  mean  that 
all  human  beings  should  be  treated  as  equal,  economically, 
intellectually,  or  as  arbiters  of  good  taste  and  knowledge 
and  culture,  then  it  becomes  one  of  the  most  disastrous 
forms  of  sentimental  moonshine,  one  of  the  silliest  super¬ 
stitions  that  have  been  foisted  on  human  society.  The  real 


THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF  HISTORY 


511 


value,  and  limit,  of  Democracy  lies  in  its  usableness  as 
an  instrumentality  by  which,  through  a  fair  opportunity 
being  vouchsafed  to  every  self  to  find  and  show  what  is  in 
him,  a  larger  proportion  of  exceptional  individuals  rise 
above  the  common  level,  and,  thus,  become  potent  factors 
in  raising  the  average  level  of  intelligence ,  efficiency,  fair 
play,  goocl  taste,  cooperation ,  and  honest  service.  In  short, 
democracy  is  a  means  to  an  end — the  enrichment  and  har¬ 
monization  of  the  physical  and  rational — or  spiritual — 
values  of  life.  The  better  achievement  of  this  end  by  all 
ivill  depend  upon  the  nurture  of  a  larger  proportion  of 
creators  and  leaders. 


References 

Augustine,  The  City  of  God. 

*  Avey,  A.  E.,  Readings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  XXVII. 

Bagehot,  Physics  and  Politics. 

Barth,  P.,  Die  Philosophie  cler  Geschichte  als  Sociologie. 

Bernheim,  Lehrbucli  der  historischen  Methode. 

Buckle,  H.  T.,  History  of  Civilization  in  England,  Chapters 
I  and  II. 

Carlyle,  Thomas,  Heroes  and  Hero  Worship ,  and  Past  and 
Present. 

Comte,  Positive  Philosophy,  translated  by  Martineau. 

Croce,  Benedetto,  History:  Its  Theory  and  Practice. 

Eucken,  Life's  Basis  and  Life’s  Ideal,  The  Problem  of  Human 
Life,  and  Article,  “Geschichtsphilosophie”  in  Systematische 
Philosophie  (in  series  Die  Kultur  der  Gegenwart) . 

Fichte,  J.  G.,  Characteristics  of  the  Present  Age,  and  Addresses 
to  the  German  Nation. 

Flint,  R.,  History  of  the  Philosophy  of  History. 

Giddings,  F.  H.,  Principles  of  Sociology. 

Grotenfelt,  Arvid,  Geschichtliche  Wertmassstd.be  in  der  Ge- 
sch  ich  tsph  ilosoph  ie. 

Hegel,  Philosophy  of  History. 

Kidd,  B.,  Principles  of  Western  Civilization. 

Lamprecht,  Iv.,  What  is  History ? 

Lotze,  Microcosmus. 

Matthews,  Shailer,  The  Spiritual  Interpretation  of  History. 


512  THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 

Rickert,  H.,  Die  Grenzen  der  naturwissenschaftlichen  Be- 
griffsbildung,  Ilte  Auflage,  and  Article,  “Geschichtsphiloso- 
phie”  in  Die  Philosophic  im  Beginn  des  Zwanzigsten  Jahr- 
hunderts. 

Robinson,  J.  H.,  The  New  History. 

Rousseau,  J.  J.,  Social  Contract,  Emile,  and  Discourse  Concern¬ 
ing  the  Origins  of  Inequality. 

Simmel,  G.,  Die  Probleme  der  Geschichtsphilosophie,  Ilte  Auflage. 

Spencer,  H.,  Principles  of  Sociology,  and  Principles  of  Ethics. 

Teggart,  F.  J.,  The  Processes  of  History. 

Troeltsch,  Ernst,  Article  “Historiography”  in  Encyclopaedia 
of  Religion  and  Ethics. 

Ward,  L.  F.,  Dynamic  Sociology. 

Windelband,  History  of  Philosophy,  pp.  255-262  and  pp.  648- 
659. 

Woodbridge,  F.  J.  E.,  The  Purpose  of  History. 

Xenopol,  A.  D.,  Les  principes  fondementaux  de  Vhistoire. 


CHAPTER  XXIX 


EPISTEMOLOGY 

Theory  of  Knowledge 

Epistemology  (from  the  Greek  episteme ,  knowledge  or 
science,  and  logos ,  theory)  is  the  technical  name  for  sys¬ 
tematic  enquiries  into  the  nature,  conditions,  and  criteria 
of  human  knowledge  in  general.  It  is  intimately  connected 
with  metaphysics,  the  theory  of  reality,  and  with  logic, 
the  theory  of  thought.  Indeed  it  might  be  called  the  logic 
of  metaphysics. 

All  the  principal  theories  of  knowledge  have  been  already 
discussed.  It  is  indeed  impossible  to  discuss  systematically 
theories  of  reality  or  the  theories  of  the  great  philosophers 
without  going  into  epistemological  questions.  In  the  his¬ 
torical  introduction  it  was  pointed  out  that  the  problem 
of  knowledge  was  definitely  raised  and  discussed  by  Plato 
and,  indeed,  we  find  more  or  less  fragmentary  theories  of 
knowledge  before  Plato.  It  has  occupied  a  foremost  posi¬ 
tion  in  modern  philosophy  ever  since  Descartes  and  Locke. 
At  this  point  we  wish  to  get  a  summary  view  of  the 
principal  problems  of  knowledge  and  of  the  principal  an¬ 
swers  to  these  problems.  It  will  be  my  aim  systematically 
to  gather  together  the  discussions  and  the  points  of  view 
as  to  the  nature,  structure,  and  function  of  knowledge 
that  have  been  scattered  through  our  previous  discussions. 

In  modern  epistemology  there  are  three  chief  problems. 
These  of  course  cannot  be  absolutely  separated.  No  prin¬ 
cipal  problem  of  knowledge  can  be  thus  isolated  from  the 

513 


514 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


other  chief  problems.  In  philosophy  our  quest  is  for 
a  unified  conception  of  reality.  One’s  standpoint  on  any 
one  of  these  problems  of  knowledge  will  determine  largely, 
if  not  entirely,  his  standpoint  on  the  other  problems.  For 
emphasis,  however,  it  is  possible  to  distinguish  between 
these  problems.  The  three  problems  are  the  following : 

1.  What  are  the  sources  of  knowledge — whence  is  our 
knowledge  derived  ? 

2.  What  is  the  place  of  knowledge  in  the  world  of 
being — what  is  the  relation  of  cognition  to  reality? 

3.  What  are  the  norms,  the  criteria,  the  standards  of 
knowledge?  (This  problem  will  be  the  subject-matter  of 
the  next  chapter.  In  the  present  chapter  I  shall  consider 
the  first  and  second  problems.) 

I.  Problem  of  the  Sources  of  Knowledge 

From  the  beginning  of  modern  philosophy  down  to  the 
present  time,  one  finds  two  antithetical  views  as  to  the 
sources  of  knowledge,  namely,  empiricism  and  rationalism. 

Empiricism  is  predominantly  a  British  tradition  in 
philosophy.  We  find  its  beginnings  in  some  of  the  nom¬ 
inalists  of  the  Middle  Ages  and  it  then  moves  forward, 
with  ever  increasing  momentum,  through  Francis  Bacon, 
Hobbes,  Locke,  Hume,  J.  S.  Mill,  and  others.  The  central 
thesis  of  this  movement  is  that  all  knowledge  is  derived 
from  sense  experience.  Locke,  for  example,  while  not  an 
out  and  out  empiricist,  in  that  he  admits  that  there  are 
certain  kinds  of  knowledge  arrived  at  by  reflection,  says 
that  there  are  two  chief  sources  of  knowledge,  namely, 
ideas  of  sense  and  ideas  of  reflection.  Hume,  who  is  a 
thoroughgoing  empiricist,  has  a  different  terminology  from 
Locke.  Hume  calls  Locke’s  “ ideas  of  sense”  “impres¬ 
sions,”  and  uses  the  term  “ideas”  to  designate  copies  or 
traces  of  sense  impressions  in  the  mind.  All  ideas  are 


EPISTEMOLOGY 


515 


derived  from  sense  impressions  for  Hume.  These  men, 
save  to  the  extent  that  Locke  is  a  rationalist,  regard  the 
mind  as  a  sort  of  wax  tablet  or  sheet  of  paper  on  which 
impressions  are  made.  The  mind  is  but  a  name  for  the 
records  made  by  the  sequences  of  impressions.  Impres¬ 
sions  are  made  on  the  mind  and  thus  the  mind  is  mod¬ 
ified.  We  must  be  careful  to  note,  however,  that  there  is 
no  substance-mind  for  Hume.  For  him,  at  least,  mind  is 
only  the  tied-up  succession  of  impressions.  Mind  is  only 
the  processions  of  ideas  and  impressions.1 * * 

Where  do  these  impressions  come  from  ?  Hume  7s  answer 
virtually  is,  “I  don't  know.”  “I  feel,”  he  says  in  effect, 
“only  a  constant  succession  of  impressions  and  ideas.7 7 
Nowhere  can  Hume  find  a  substantial  mind.  As  to  the 
modes  whereby  these  successions  get  tied  together,  Hume 
says  that  this  is  accomplished  by  means  of  such  psycho¬ 
logical  laws  as — association  by  contiguity,  resemblance,  and 
succession.  It  is  by  means  of  these  laws  that  ideas  get 
married.  The  fact  that  you  have  had  two  impressions 
contiguous  and  immediately  succeeding  one  another  leads 
an  impression  or  idea  similar  to  one  to  call  up  the 
other.  Hume  says  that  all  our  knowledge  is  built  up 
in  these  ways  from  impressions  which  are  connected  up 
by  means  of  these  laws  of  association.  We  had  better  not 
say  we  have  impressions  and  copies,  since  there  is  no  self ; 
it  would  be  truer  to  say  there  are  impressions  and  these 
mysteriously  engender  copies  which  get  associated  in  a 
variety  of  ways. 

The  idea  of  causation,  which  was  the  central  difficulty 
for  Hume,  and  which  Kant  later  generalized  in  such  a 
way  as  to  show  that  it  is  but  one  of  the  many  types  of 
synthetic  a  priori  connections,  is  derived,  says  Hume,  from 

1  William  James  lias  a  better  way  of  stating  how  ideas  are 

connected.  He  calls  the  connection  “the  unity  of  the  passing 

thought.” 


516 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


the  repeated  succession  of  our  impressions.  If  it  is  noticed 
that  A  is  always  followed  by  B,  there  is  soon  formed  the 
habit  of  expecting,  of  looking  for  B,  whenever  we  see  A. 
All  we  mean  by  causation  is  that  there  have  been  in  a  num¬ 
ber  of  cases  similar  sequences  of  impressions.  If,  for 
example,  A  is  followed  by  B  and  A2  by  B2,  and  so  on, 
then  if  we  ever  perceive  Au  we  shall  of  course  expect, 
through  the  force  of  this  habit,  that  Bn  will  follow.  Causa¬ 
tion  is  the  name  of  a  habit  engendered  by  such  a  repetition 
of  resembling  sequences  of  impression.  For  the  pure  em¬ 
piricist,  the  mind  is  either  wholly  passive  or  it  is  nothing 
at  all.  Knowledge  consists  of  the  repeated  association,  in 
various  ways,  of  sense  impressions  and  copies  of  sense  im¬ 
pressions.  We  can,  according  to  empiricism,  account  for 
images  and  concepts  and  for  their  modes  of  association, 
but  we  remain  absolutely  mute  when  we  try  to  give  an 
account  of  the  source  of  the  original  perceptual  knowledge. 

The  rationalist  maintains  that  true  knowledge  is  de¬ 
rived  from  thought  itself,  from  the  activity  of  reason.  He 
believes  that  truth  is  a  function  of  the  power  of  thought  to 
constitute  a  totality.  The  highest  kind  of  knowledge  consists 
in  universally  valid  propositions  that  are  consistent  with 
one  another.  Sense  experience  does  not  give  us  propositions 
which  are  universally  valid  or  mutually  consistent.  By  the 
great  philosophers  of  Greece  and  such  modern  philosophers 
as  Descartes,  Spinoza,  Leibnitz,  Kant,  Hegel,  and  all  the 
later  idealists  after  Hegel,  this  claim  of  the  inability  of  sense 
experience  to  give  us  coherent  and  universal  judgments  is 
reiterated.  From  sense  perception,  say  the  rationalists,  we 
can  get  only  a  number  of  particular  cases.  The  cases  may, 
to  be  sure,  be  similar  to  one  another,  but  we  never  get 
universally  valid  linkages  of  thought.  Now,  our  sense 
experience  is  full  of  inconsistencies  and  discrepancies,  and 
the  rationalist  maintains  that,  when  we  examine  these  in- 


EPISTEMOLOGY 


517 


consistencies  and  discrepancies  in  sense  perception,  we  find 
them  to  be  dne  to  the  imperfect  activity  of  thought.  Knowl¬ 
edge  for  the  rationalist  is  more  than  a  connection  of  ex¬ 
periences  by  passive  repetition  and  association  and  by 
emotionally  engendered  beliefs.  Reasoning  is  a  process  of 
actively  relating  and  classifying  our  experiences,  but  this 
may  be  done  so  hastily  that  sufficient  scrutiny  is  not  exer¬ 
cised  to  avoid  error.  We  may  correct  error  under  the 
guidance  of  certain  innate  or  a  priori,  fundamental  laws 
of  thought.  In  this  way  the  very  principles  that  we  em¬ 
ploy  in  organizing  our  experiences  have  a  different  source 
from  our  sense  impressions.  Our  intellectual  structure  is 
such  that  we  cannot  tolerate  incoherences  and  contradic¬ 
tions  in  thought.  Our  rational  nature  demands  consistency. 
Two  contradictory  propositions  cannot  be  true  simulta¬ 
neously,  and  if  one  denies  this  he  virtually  denies  the 
possibility  of  science.  He  negates  the  very  nature  of  reason. 

Our  ordinary  sense  experience,  as  interpreted  under 
the  influence  of  tradition  and  feeling,  gives  us  many  con¬ 
tradictory  propositions.  Of  these  we  say  that  they  are 
misconstrued  data,  that  the  experiences  cannot  have 
been  taken  in  their  right  relations.  In  order  to  think 
scientifically  we  are  obliged  to  accept  the  validity  and 
authority  of  the  laws  of  thought.  The  first  of  these  laws 
is  called  the  Principle  of  Identity.  It  means  that  in  any 
discussion  that  is  to  get  anywhere  we  must  stick  to  our 
definitions.  Its  objects  must  have  certain  invariant  charac¬ 
teristics  if  thought  is  to  continue.  Another  of  these  funda¬ 
mental  principles  is  called  the  Law  of  Contradiction — two 
contradictory  propositions  cannot  both  be  true  simultane¬ 
ously.  These  principles,  together  with  others  which  logic 
formulates,  are  the  presuppositionless  or  ultimate  bases  of 
all  valid  thinking.  In  regard  to  all  the  other  sciences,  we 
find  that  they  rest  upon  certain  logical  presuppositions. 
There  is  always  some  Atlas  upon  which  the  group  of  order 


518 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


series,  which  constitutes  any  particular  science,  rests.  But 
at  this  point  in  the  discussion  of  the  theory  of  knowledge 
we  come  upon  a  unique  situation.  The  primary  presuppo¬ 
sitions  of  knowledge  are  the  logical  principles  which  guide 
and  control  the  mind  in  its  entire  quest  for  knowledge. 
They  are  justified  by  the  fact  that,  by  their  use,  experience 
gets  more  meaning,  becomes  more  harmonious,  more  intel¬ 
ligible. 

Another  of  these  ultimate  logical  principles  is  that  of 
the  causal  category  or  Principle  of  Sufficient  Ground. 
Why  does  one  always  look  for  causal  relations?  We  say 
that  nothing  can  happen  without  a  sufficient  cause  or 
ground.  This  attitude  seems  to  be  native  to  the  mind. 
We  are  not  satisfied  with  saying  that  things  just  happen. 
We  look  diligently  for  causes.  Many  of  us  are  uneasy 
until  we  find  out  the  how  and  the  why  of  happenings. 
We  distinguish  between  causal  sequences  and  those  that 
are  not  causal.  Of  the  latter,  the  sequence  of  day  and 
night  may  be  taken  as  an  illustration.  The  causal  series 
differs  from  the  noncausal  in  that  the  former  is  an  irre¬ 
versible  series.  We  may  agree  with  the  empiricist  that 
the  specific  aspects  of  any  given  causal  sequence  are,  in 
all  particular  cases,  dependent  upon  empirical  data.  But 
the  empiricist  fails  to  account  for  the  native  propensity 
of  the  mind  insistently  to  demand  the  causal  grounds  of 
every  event.  Thus  the  mind  seems  to  have  certain  specific 
native  ways  of  operation,  and  in  logic  we  study  these 
ways.  The  whole  subject  matter  of  logic  is  the  study  of 
the  structure  of  human  reason.  The  empiricist  is  evi¬ 
dently  right  in  saying  that  the  data  of  knowledge  are 
found  in  experience,  and  no  reasonable  rationalist  will 
deny  that  postulate,  but  he  insists  that  the  data  do  not 
fashion  the  tools  by  which  knowledge  is  made.  Indeed, 
Kant  emphatically  asserted  that  there  could  be  no  knowl¬ 
edge  without  empirical  data  and  became  agnostic  only 


EPISTEMOLOGY 


519 


at  points  where  such  empirical  data  are  not  present. 
Empiricism  has  a  tendency  to  confine  experience  to  what 
we  perceive  through  the  outer  senses,  but  in  doing  so  it 
overlooks  the  fact  that  we  have  a  large  framework  of 
affectional,  moral,  social,  and  logical  context ;  all  of  which 
belongs  to  experience  in  the  full  sense  of  the  term. 

The  sound  position  may  be  called  rational  empiricism  or 
empirical  rationalism.  In  contrast  with  a  priori  rationalism, 
it  stresses  the  dependence  of  all  our  knowledge  on  ex¬ 
perience.  In  contrast  with  sensationalistic  empiricism, 
it  insists  on  the  purposive  activity  of  the  mind  in  know¬ 
ing  and  holds  that  the  success  of  this  activity  implies 
a  vital  intercourse  between  the  mind  and  reality.  Such 
a  point  of  view  makes  an  organic  synthesis  of  the  valid 
claims  of  both  rationalism  and  empiricism.  From  this 
standpoint  we  explicitly  hold  that  the  materials  of  knowl¬ 
edge  come  to  us  in  experience,  but  the  materials  thus  given 
are  organized  by  the  activity  of  reason  into  the  texture 
of  our  sciences.  This  native  capacity  of  the  reason  is  not 
to  be  interpreted,  as  many  interpret  Plato  and  other  his¬ 
toric  rationalists,  as  being  a  body  of  categories  which 
have  come  into  existence  independently  of  the  creative  or 
synthetic  processes  of  experience.  The  universal  prin¬ 
ciples  of  knowledge  are  the  mind’s  fundamental  ways  of 
working  as  these  develop  in  and  through  the  organization 
of  experience. 

Sensationalistic  empiricism  is  nominalistic.  Concepts 
and  universals,  which  are  the  chief  tools  of  science,  are 
from  this  standpoint  nothing  but  signs  or  symbols,  and 
it  is  impossible  to  determine  with  any  degree  of  accuracy 
what  the  relation  is  that  subsists  between  the  symbols  and 
the  things  symbolized.  The  thing  signified  or  symbolized 
is  not  a  matter  of  experience,  consequently  our  concepts 
and  universals  are  subjective  formations ;  they  are  names 
for  relations  which  arise  in  the  mind  between  ideas.  Hume, 


520 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


who  is  one  of  the  most  instructive  figures  in  the  history 
of  philosophy  because  he  worked  out  the  logical  conse¬ 
quences  of  empiricism,  argued  that  the  only  kind  of  knowl¬ 
edge  that  has  any  certainty  is  mathematics.  Now  this 
certainty  is  due  to  the  fact  that  mathematics  deals  only 
with  relations  between  ideas.  Such  relations  as  these  of 
identity,  difference,  magnitude,  and  degree  have  to  do 
only  with  the  comparison  of  ideas  with  one  another.  Yet 
Hume  is  constrained  to  say  that  even  in  mathematics  the 
oftener  we  run  over  a  proof  the  more  certain  do  we  be¬ 
come.  Repetition  of  similar  experiences  is  the  test  of 
truth.  Thus  empiricism  is  not  just  to  the  character  of 
mathematics.  Mathematics  does  not  deal  with  existence 
theorems.  It  is  not  concerned  with  the  existence  of  points, 
lines,  circles,  et  cetera,  in  nature.  Indeed  it  abstracts  even 
from  the  relation  of  mathematical  space  to  the  space  of 
perception.  Pure  mathematics  deals  with  ideal  construc¬ 
tions.  Thus  far  Hume  is  correct,  but  the  validity  of  a 
mathematical  theorem  is  in  no  wise  dependent  on  the  fre¬ 
quency  of  our  running  over  the  proof.  In  the  last  genera¬ 
tion  the  science  of  mathematics  has  been  very  largely 
reconstructed  by  the  discovery  and  the  elaboration  of 
more  rigorous  methods  of  proof.  Keen,  critical  minds, 
endowed  with  a  passion  for  certitude,  have  discovered 
flaws  even  in  Euclid.  Minds,  in  the  highest  degree 
equipped  with  the  rational  structure  of  which  I  spoke 
above,  have  criticized  and  discovered  flaws  in  certain 
mathematical  demonstrations  which  had  been  supposed  to 
be  irrefutable.  But  these  more  rigorous  methods  of  proof 
have  not  increased  in  rigor  merely  by  being  repeated 
many  times  by  many  persons. 

There  is  another  difficulty  with  the  empirical  attitude. 
Granted  that  mathematics  deals,  not  with  existence,  but 
with  relations  of  ideas  connected  by  reason,  we  are  justi¬ 
fied  in  saying  that  mathematics  is  an  invention.  We  must 


EPISTEMOLOGY 


521 


say  that  it  is  a  product  not  of  the  senses  but  of  the  reason. 
But  mathematics  applies  to  the  world  in  which  we  live. 
The  triumph  of  the  modern  mechanical  theory  of  nature 
is  due  to  the  faith  its  authors  had  that  nature  is  a  kind 
of  crystallized  mathematics.  It  is  small  wonder  that 
Galileo  and  others  called  mathematics  divine — “What  we 
can  measure  we  can  know.”  Mathematics  works.  It 
works  in  its  application  to  past  experience,  to  present  ex¬ 
perience  and  further,  to  possible  experience.  The  pre¬ 
dictive  power  of  mathematical  science  is  great.  Take  this 
illustration.  In  1843  two  astronomers  made  a  calculation, 
based  upon  the  deviation  of  the  observed  path  of  the 
planet  Uranus  from  the  path  it  should  describe  in  view 
of  the  relations,  the  relative  points,  and  motions  of  the 
planets  known  by  observation  to  exist.  The  path  of 
LTranus  as  calculated  from  the  observed  relations  of  the 
recorded  planets  should  have  been  of  a  certain  character. 
The  observed  path,  however,  was  aberrant.  In  view  of 
this,  what  did  the  mathematical  astronomers  do?  The 
astronomer  said,  “there  must  be  an  hitherto  unobserved 
planet,”  and  he  calculated  the  locus  of  this  planet.  At 
Berlin  the  royal  astronomer  heeded  the  order  of  the  as¬ 
tronomers  in  question  and  looked  as  he  was  told  for  the 
planet  and  lo,  it  was  there.  This  is  only  one  of  the  many 
cases  of  prediction.  The  most  recent  striking  instance  was 
the  approximate  agreement  of  the  observations  of  the  solar 
eclipse  of  1919  with  the  calculations  based  on  Einstein’s 
theory  of  the  deflection  of  light.  The  more  science  develops 
by  so  much  the  more  do  we  have  cases  of  this  kind.  Let  me 
note  as  a  curious  fact  that  Hume,  who  says  that  the  whole 
idea  of  causation  is  a  mere  result  of  habit,  presupposes  the 
very  idea  he  seeks  to  explain,  inasmuch  as  he  is  already 
seeking  a  cause  for  the  origin  of  our  belief  in  causation. 

Our  view  is  realistic.  It  is  realistic  in  that  it  regards 
universals  and  other  relations  as  facts  that  the  mind  dis- 


522 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


covers  by  the  use  of  its  fundamental  ways  of  working. 
Reality  has  rational  order,  texture,  coherence.  It  is  not 
chaotic,  and  it  is  because  of  this  doctrine  as  to  the  texture 
of  reality  that  rationalistic  realism  finds  a  place  for  science, 
whereas  for  nominalism  science  is  but  a  set  of  subjective 
symbols  of  an  unknown  reality.  Science  is  objective  in  its 
application. 

Kant,  though  he  answered  Hume,  never  freed  himself 
completely  from  the  influence  of  empiricism.  He  said  that 
the  materials  of  knowledge  come  into  the  mind  as  a  chaotic 
manifold  and  that  mind,  through  its  synthetic  organizing 
power,  arranges  this  chaotic  mass  into  the  ordered  whole 
which  we  call  the  world.  The  mind  puts  the  relations  into 
nature.  This  view’  is  an  inconsistent  one,  for,  if  mind  puts 
the  relations  into  nature,  then  the  W’orld  is  the  fabrication 
of  our  own  povTers  and  wTe  are  not  delivered  from  sub¬ 
jectivity. 

Later  idealists  start  from  Kant’s  view  that  mind  is  an 
organizing  principle,  and  they  hold  that  the  successful 
working  of  the  mind  in  the  w’orld  shows  that  the  environ¬ 
ment  has  an  intelligible  texture.  This  is  w’hat  objective 
idealism  teaches.  It  is  not  true  that  wTe  know7  only  ideas,  as 
Berkeley  argued.  It  is  the  fact  that  in  science  we  are 
discovering  the  nature  of  mind  and  finding  that  it  has 
a  given  structure,  which  has  its  correlate  in  nature,  that 
gives  efficacy  to  mind.  Mind  is  an  effective  part  of  the 
wrorld.  In  short,  mind  is  at  home  in  the  world. 

William  James,  wTho  partially  misunderstood  rationalism, 
and  was  at  the  same  time  rightly  dissatisfied  with  empiri¬ 
cism,  called  his  view  radical  empiricism.  It  is  pure 
mythology,  he  says,  to  argue  that  all  that  comes  to  the 
mind  is  mere  unrelated  data.  We  cannot  put  our  finger 
on  any  disconnected  item  of  experience.  Every  item  is 
related.  The  minimum  of  experience  at  least  involves  the 
relating  implied  in  the  answer  to  such  a  question  as,  “what 


EPISTEMOLOGY 


523 


is  that?”  The  mind  starts  out  with  its  classificatory 
tentacles,  its  incipient  universals.  We  are  everlastingly 
propounding  the  question  “what  does  this  fact  mean?”; 
and  thus  we  start  on  the  endless  process  of  relating  data. 
There  is  no  such  thing  as  an  unrelated  datum  of  sense. 
Psychologists  are  now  agreed  that  there  are  no  such  things 
as  pure  sensations.  James  misunderstood  rationalism,  in 
so  far  as  he  thought  that  it  is  one  of  the  cardinal  doctrines 
of  this  view  to  suppose  that  mind  comes  down  from  above, 
as  it  were,  and  puts  relations  into  the  data  in  an  external 
fashion.  James,  in  his  doctrine  of  a  “pure  experience” 
free  from  the  distinctions  and  relations  which  thought 
makes,  overlooked  the  fact  that  it  is  impossible  for  us  to 
have  mere  sensations,  although,  in  other  passages,  he  recog¬ 
nizes  that  there  are  no  pure  sensations.  He  seems  to  have 
held  that  this  so-called  pure  experience  is  the  reality 
which  thought  distorts  and  disfigures.  The  truth  is  the 
mind  is  always  active  and  all  that  comes  to  mind  is  related. 
The  meaning  of  this  is  that  our  world  has  an  intelligible, 
rational,  texture  or  structure. 

II.  Knowledge  and  Reality 

We  have  already  discussed  incidentally  the  place  of 
knowing  in  reality.  It  now  remains  to  gather  up  briefly 
these  suggestions  into  a  systematic  view. 

The  simplest  answer  to  the  query,  what  is  the  relation 
of  cognition  to  reality?  is  called  naive  or  presentational 
realism.  This  is  the  view  of  the  common  man  (that  hor¬ 
rible  example),  the  person  who  has  not  thought  of  this 
problem.  He  is  naive ;  for  him  there  is  no  distinction 
between  mind  and  the  object  of  mind.  For  him  mind  is 
at  one  with  its  object.  The  object  known  and  the  know¬ 
ing  process  are  numerically  and  qualitatively  identical. 
The  thing  perceived  is  identical  with  the  percept. 


524 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


This  position  is  untenable.  No  two  of  us  in  this  class¬ 
room  see  this  table  before  me  in  the  same  way.  Your 
perception  is  a  function  of  your  position,  of  light,  shade, 
of  movements,  and  of  infinite  other  variations.  In  fact 
your  perception  is  a  function  of  your  sense  organs,  of 
your  perceptors  as  these  are  determined  by  your  mental 
habits  and  interests.  From  Zeno  down  the  skeptics  have 
been  pointing  out  arguments  that  show  the  duality  of  the 
knowing  mind  and  the  known  objects. 

One  remove  from  naive  is  representational  realism.  The 
stock  example  of  this  point  of  view  is  John  Locke.  This 
view  admits  the  validity  of  the  criticism  just  made  of 
naive  realism,  and  so  this  view  starts  from  the  existence 
of  percepts,  images,  and  mental  conceptions,  as  being  the 
sole  immediate  data  of  knowing,  and  says  that  we  know 
only  our  ideas.  Our  ideas  are  representations,  copies, 
symbols,  of  the  real  things. 

It  is  quite  true  that  representation  does  play  a  consid¬ 
erable  part  in  our  knowledge.  In  response  to  my  request, 
you  describe  the  State  House.  In  doing  so  you  call  up 
images  of  the  State  House.  Your  idea  is  a  kind  of  rep¬ 
resentation,  replica,  or  copy ;  but  how  do  we  settle  whether 
the  description  you  give  is  a  copy?  We  appeal  to  the  fact. 
The  fact  confirms  or  rejects  the  copy.  If  we  take,  however, 
the  copy  view  on  all  fours,  we  never  get  anything  but 
ideas.  Then  how  can  we  settle,  how  can  we  ever  agree? 
Representational  realism  is  only  a  halfway  mansion ;  we 
cannot  stay  at  this  place.  Any  man  that  thinks  must  pack 
up  his  tent  and  move  on  to  some  more  substantial  city. 
One  more  remove  is  the  position  known  as  phenomenal- 
istic  idealism.2  Ernst  Mach,  Karl  Pearson,  and,  in  part, 
Immanuel  Kant  are  representatives  of  this  position.  These 
men  assert  that  we  do  not  know  reality.  We  cannot 

2  Improperly  so-called.  It  should  be  called  phenomenalistio 
psychologism  or  ideaism.  This  is  Hume’s  position. 


EPISTEMOLOGY 


525 


tell  to  what  extent,  if  indeed  to  any  at  all,  our  ideas  truly 
represent  reality.  The  really  real  things  forever  retreat 
up  the  spiral  stairway  of  reality.  We  reach  out  our  con¬ 
ceptual  tentacles  to  make  a  seizure  into  reality,  but  we 
remain  in  the  veil.  Between  us  and  reality  there  is  a 
wall  of  partition  which  no  thinking  can  ever  penetrate. 
We  do  not  know  reality. 

Herbert  Spencer,  too,  teaches  phenomenalism.  He  calls 
his  position  transfigured  realism.  In  knowing  reality, 
he  says,  we  transfigure  it;  it  becomes  in  the  knowledge 
context  something  quite  different  from  what  it  is  outside 
the  knowledge  relation.  The  knowledge  relation  does  not 
bring  us  into  touch  with  reality  as  it  is.  Through  our  ex¬ 
periences  of  resistance  we  know  that  there  is  an  external 
reality ;  what  it  is  we  know  not,  beyond  the  inference  that 
it  is  something  which  resists  our  efforts.  From  this  em¬ 
pirical  fact,  he  concludes  that  the  sense  of  effort  is  the  key 
to  the  nature  of  reality,  and  that  reality  is  an  infinite  and 
eternal  energy  from  which  all  things  proceed. 

Let  me  briefly  indicate  two  difficulties  in  this  view : 

(1)  Knowledge  works  in  the  world.  In  the  only  world  with 
which  we  have  anything  to  do,  we  find  that  knowledge 
does  function  effectively,  and  we  further  find  that  the  in¬ 
creasing  success  of  knowledge  is  due  to  the  fact  that  we 
have  analyzed  and  systematized  our  experiences.  Errors 
are  half  truths.  Illusions  are  experiences  wrongly  inter¬ 
preted,  set  in  the  wrong  relations,  in  the  wrong  context, 
and  the  distinction  between  the  knowdedge  of  phenomena 
and  the  knowledge  of  reality  is  only  a  distinction  of  degree. 

(2)  Phenomenalistic  idealism  is  inconsistent  in  the  very 
distinction  which  serves  as  its  starting  point.  How  do 
we  know  that  we  know  only  phenomena,  if  we  do  not  know 
the  real?  The  lapidarist  says  of  a  certain  specimen  handed 
to  him,  “this  is  a  sham  diamond. ”  Such  pronouncement 
is  impossible  unless  there  be  a  knowledge  of  the  real 


526 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


diamond.  Phenomenalism  assumes  that  there  is  a  veil 
between  us  and  reality.  How  do  we  know  it  is  a  veil 
if  we  have  never  been  through  the  veil  and  looked  upon 
the  holy  of  holies?  Our  world  of  experience  is  the  only 
world  with  which  we  have  to  deal.  The  phenomenalist 
makes  a  distinction  which  involves  him  in  a  contradiction. 
By  wThat  sources  does  he  know  that  we  do  not  know  real 
things?  There  is  no  meaning  in  the  distinction  between 
the  sham  and  the  real,  unless  we  know  enough  about  the 
real  to  be  able  to  compare  it  with  the  sham. 

III.  Critical  Realism 

Our  solution  of  the  above  problem  rests  on  the  thesis 
that  we  know  reality  in  part  and  are  capable  of  knowing 
it  more  fully.  It  is  also  our  contention  that  the  progress 
of  knowledge  shows  an  increasing  correspondence  between 
mind  or  the  knower  and  the  world.  There  is  a  growth  in 
the  agreement  between  thought  and  things,  and  this  evolu¬ 
tion  is  manifested  in  the  progress  of  pure  science  and  in 
its  successful  applications.  Many  of  our  ideas  do  seem  to 
consist  of  mental  representations  of  actual  past  or  possible 
future  experiences.  Considered  as  ideas,  these  representa¬ 
tions  vary  in  concreteness  and  pictorialness  from  images 
to  the  symbolic  formulas  of  mathematics  and  logic.  But 
these  representative  ideas  contain  truth,  because  the  rep¬ 
resentative  experiences  that  human  beings  have  had  stand 
for  further  experiences  which  may  be  had  under  definite 
and  assignable  conditions. 

The  standpoint  of  critical  realism  is  that  mind  is  a  live 
focus  of  reality,  that  there  is  an  active  correspondence  of 
mind  and  reality,  in  short,  it  is  that  mind  is  a  true  part 
of  reality.  Minds  are  centers  in  which  the  nature  of  reality 
becomes  conscious  of  itself,  and  in  this  way,  mind  is  seen  to 
be  something  very  different  from  the  old  soul  principle 


EPISTEMOLOGY 


527 


which  was  shut  off  by  unscalable  walls  from  the  world. 
Reality  is  not  something  impenetrably  hidden  behind  a 
veil.  Reality  is  what  is  or  may  be  experienced,  and  what 
may  be  inferred  from  experience.  The  other  side  of  the 
moon,  the  center  of  the  earth  and  the  polar  ice  cap  of  the 
Antarctic  region  are  items  of  rational  belief  which  we  infer 
from  our  experiences. 

By  saying  that  there  is  ether  or  that  there  are  electrons, 
what  does  one  mean  ?  I  take  it  that  we  can  only  mean  that 
these  are  logical  constructions  inferred  from  experiences. 
These  constructions,  however,  are  based  on  experience,  and 
if  there  are  electrons,  then  under  certain  assignable  condi¬ 
tions  they  should  be  perceptible.  Otherwise  the  electron 
theory  is  a  useless  hypothesis.  Reality  is  experience  as 
both  actual  and  possible.  Our  minds  and  sense  organs 
are  genuine  functioning  parts  of  the  real  world.  There  is 
an  active  and  effective  correspondence  between  thought 
and  reality  and,  since  we  make  our  concepts,  our  formulas 
and  symbols  of  things,  by  thinking  about  sense  data  and 
since,  furthermore,  these  formulas  work  in  experience,  it 
follows  that  reality  has  an  orderly  or  structural  character. 
In  short,  wTe  agree  with  Hegel  in  saying  that  reality  is 
rational. 

What  then  shall  we  say  of  illusions  and  the  so-called 
errors  of  the  senses?  In  reality  they  are  errors  of  judg¬ 
ment  and  not  of  the  senses.  The  error  is  a  function  of 
the  judgment  which  I  make.  The  man  in  delirium  tre¬ 
mens  has  a  real  experience,  so  also  the  one  who  sees 
ghosts,  but  it  is  only  in  his  interpretation  of  his  expe¬ 
rience  that  he  errs.  He  does  not  set  his  sensory  data  in 
their  right  relations.  In  epistemology  one  of  the  most 
hackneyed  illustrations  is  the  case  of  the  straight  stick 
that  is  bent  in  the  water.  In  the  water  it  looks  bent,  but 
we  say  it  is  really  straight.  The  bentness  of  the  stick  is 
due  to  the  different  refractive  powers  of  air  and  water. 


528 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


The  visual  stick  is  really  bent,  but  the  tactual  stick  is  not 
bent  and  further,  the  visual  stick  out  of  the  water  is  not 
bent.  Which  is  the  real  stick  ? 

We  live  most  of  our  time  on  land,  and  we  have  learned 
that  the  properties  or  qualities  which  are  practically  im¬ 
portant  for  us  are  those  an  object  has  when  close  to  us. 
So  we  agree  to  make  certain  sets  of  conditions  define  the 
standard  for  us  and  we  all  agree  to  that.  The  “real”  stick 
is  the  result  of  the  tacit  agreement  among  us  socially  as  to 
what  aspects  of  the  whole  series  of  sensory  qualities  called 
“stick”  are  most  important.  Our  standards  of  measure¬ 
ment  are  all  of  them  postulates  of  the  social  will.  They 
are  a  matter  of  social  convention.  So  then,  to  return  to 
the  stick  in  the  water,  suppose  that  we  were  like  seals, 
living  in  the  water  and  were  without  hands,  the  type  of 
important  qualities  would  doubtless  vary  greatly  from 
what  it  now  is.  Or  suppose  that  we  lived  on  the  surface 
of  a  sphere  and  were  unable  to  lift  ourselves  up.  Here  also 
we  would  have  a  very  different  set  of  standardized  qual¬ 
ities  and  relations.  It  may  be  objected  to  this  view  that 
what  we  mean  by  a  real  thing  is  the  thing  as  it  exists  inde¬ 
pendently  of  our  percepts.  To  this  I  reply,  yes  and  no ! 
Independent  of  my  perceiving  it,  yes!  But  no  meaning 
can  be  attached  to  the  idea  of  an  object  existing  indepen¬ 
dently  of  anybody’s  perceiving  it.  The  independent  reality 
of  an  object  is  the  reality  of  something  that  can  be  per¬ 
ceived  under  definite  assignable  conditions  by  some  sort  of 
percipient  organism.  Who  cares  about  a  real  object  which 
is  apart  from  and  indifferent  to  any  percipient  organism? 

The  real  world  is  the  world  of  social  perceivables. 
It  is  the  world  of  things  which,  under  definite  conditions, 
can,  by  anyone  equipped  with  the  proper  mental  and 
sensory  equipment,  be  experienced.  Some  say  that  the 
real  object  is  what  God  or  the  Absolute  perceives — I 
don’t  know  what  he  perceives. 


EPISTEMOLOGY 


529 


When  we  take  into  account  the  specific  characteristics 
of  the  percipient,  his  place,  his  relations  to  objects,  his 
history,  and  interests,  we  can  recognize  that  what  he  per¬ 
ceives  is  relative  to  him  and  yet  real.  Rational  em¬ 
piricism  or,  as  it  might  be  called,  critical  realism,  is  the 
view  that  we  know  reality,  not  uncritically,  however.  It 
is  a  fact  that  we  do  perceive,  and  it  is  further  a  fact  that 
we  can  improve  our  perceptions  by  means  of  the  organ¬ 
izing  activity  of  thought.  This  circumstance  indicates, 
it  seems  to  me,  that  the  world  is  in  agreement  with  mind. 

Many  critics  of  objective  or  teleological  idealism,  as 
a  metaphysical  theory,  shoot  wide  of  the  mark,  because 
they  insist  on  identifying  all  idealistic  standpoints  with 
either  phenomenalistic  “ideaism”  or  Berkeleyan  ideal¬ 
ism.  Modern  or  teleological  idealism  from  Hegel  down 
to  the  present  is  realistic  in  its  epistemology,  as  indeed 
so  were  Plato  and  Aristotle.  It  insists  that  the  human 
mind  knows  reality,  through  experience,  as  the  resultant 
of  the  active  intercourse  of  the  knower  with  his  world. 
Knowing  may  be  described,  on  the  one  hand,  as  the  process 
bv  which  the  real  world  becomes  conscious  of  itself  in 
human  minds ;  or,  on  the  other  hand,  as  the  process  by 
which  minds  transcend  their  merely  “given”  or  biological 
individuality  by  becoming  aware  of  the  qualities-in-organic- 
relation  which  constitute  the  world.  In  short,  the  organ¬ 
ization  of  experience  is  the  organization  of  selfhood, 
through  the  increasing  discovery  of  the  nature  of  reality. 
The  knower,  in  his  perceptual  reactions,  apprehends  in 
some  degree  and  manner  the  actual  qualities  of  the  real. 
The  knower  in  thinking ,  and  thus  organizing  perceptual  ex¬ 
perience,  is  discovering  the  systematic  and  intelligible  char¬ 
acter  of  reality  as  an  ordered  whole  of  things-in-relation. 
The  very  realistic  character  and  practical  success  of  human 
knowledge  indicate  that  reality  is  a  purposive  and  intel¬ 
ligible  order.  To  hold  this  is  the  essence  of  teleological 


530 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


idealism,  which  is  thus  a  metaphysical  theory  of  reality. 
Reality  as  a  whole  has  a  significant  structure.  But  such 
a  view  is  built  on  an  essentially  realistic  conception  of  the 
function  of  knowing.  We  know  reality  in  perception  and 
thought,  and  we  know  reality  thus  because  it  is  responsive 
to  the  aims  and  activities  of  minds  and,  therefore,  is  the 
expression  of  intelligence  or  reason. 

References 

Alexander,  S.,  Space,  Time  and  Deity,  Volume  II,  Book  III, 
Chapters  I  to  VIII. 

*  Avey,  A.  E.,  Readings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  XXIV. 
Berkeley,  Three  Dialogues,  and  Principles  of  Human  Knowl¬ 
edge. 

Bowne,  B.  P.,  Theory  of  Knowledge. 

Bradley,  Appearance  and  Reality,  Chapters  XV  and  XXIX. 

*  Descartes,  Meditations. 

Drake,  D.,  and  Others,  Essays  in  Critical  Realism. 

Hegel,  Logic,  and  Phenomenology  of  Mind. 

Hume,  Enquiry  Concerning  Human  U nder standing ,  Sections  II 
to  VII,  and  Treatise,  Of  the  Understanding,  Parts  I  and  III. 

*  James,  Essays  in  Radical  Empiricism,  II,  III  and  IV,  and 

Some  Problems  of  Philosophy,  III  and  IV. 

Joachim,  H.  H.,  The  Nature  of  Truth. 

Kant,  Prolegomena,  and  Critique  of  Pure  Reason. 

Laird,  John,  A  Study  in  Realism. 

Locke,  Essay  Concerning  Human  Understanding. 

Mill,  J.  S.,  Logic,  Book  II,  Chapters  III  and  IV. 

*  Paulsen,  F.,  Introduction  to  Philosophy,  Book  II,  Chapter  II. 

*  Russell,  B.,  The  Problems  of  Philosophy,  especially  Chapters 

VII  and  VIII,  Philosophical  Essays,  and  Our  Knowledge 
of  the  External  World. 

Spaulding,  E.  G.,  The  New  Rationalism. 

The  New  Realism,  Essays  by  Perry  and  others. 


CHAPTER  XXX 


THE  CRITERIA  OF  TRUTH 

The  third  main  problem  of  epistemology  is  the  funda¬ 
mental  problem  of  logic.  Inasmuch  as  philosophy  is  the 
application  of  logic  to  the  systematic  interpretation  of  the 
most  general  features  of  experience,  we  have  been  com¬ 
pelled  to  use  the  logical  criteria  of  truth  all  along  the 
line  in  this  course.  It  now  remains  to  state  systematically 
what  these  criteria  are  and  to  examine  them  critically. 
There  are  three  chief  doctrines  on  this  matter — (1)  the 
Copy  Theory,  (2)  the  Pragmatic  Theory,  and  (3)  the 
Rationalistic  Theory. 

I.  The  Copy  Theory  of  Truth 

According  to  this  theory  ideas  (including  in  the  term 
“idea,”  images,  concepts,  and  propositions)  are  true  if 
they  are  good  copies  of  realities.  Some  of  them,  that  is, 
images,  are  pictures  of  realities.  Some  of  them,  abstract 
concepts  and  propositions,  and  in  general  the  convention¬ 
alized  formulas  of  mathematics  and  science,  are  linguistic 
symbols  of  realities. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  spend  much  time  now  examin¬ 
ing  this  theory.  A  great  many  of  our  ideas,  namely  all 
those  which  refer  to  objects  not  present  to  sense,  are 
either  representatives  or  symbols  of  realities.  But  the 
test  of  the  validity  or  truth  of  these  ideas  is  whether  they 
correspond  with,  and  will  lead  us,  under  the  appropriate 
conditions,  to  an  adequate  experimental  acquaintance  with, 

531 


532 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


the  things  which  they  represent  or  symbolize.  The  test 
of  their  truthfulness  is  their  agreement  with  experience. 
The  knowledge  about  things  which  they  appear  to  bear 
is  true  knowledge  only  in  so  far  as  they  can  be  cashed 
in  in  direct  experience  by  perceiving,  handling,  working 
with  the  things  represented  by  them.  If  I  have  an  idea 
of  a  certain  office  building  and  the  distance  to  it,  my 
idea  is  true  if  it  will  guide  me  there.  If  I  have  a  scientific 
formula,  it  is  true  if  it  will  enable  me  to  solve  a  chemical 
or  an  engineering  problem.  But  when  it  is  maintained  that 
all  ideas  are  copies  of  realities,  we  answer  that  if  there  are 
two  worlds,  the  mental  world  of  ideas  and  the  real  world 
outside,  which  are  shut  out  from  direct  contact  with  one 
another,  then  we  are  landed  in  phenomenalism ;  and  finally, 
when  we  think  this  doctrine  through  to  the  end,  in  an 
inconsistent  subjectivism  and  skepticism.  For,  unless  we 
have  direct  acquaintance  at  some  points  with  reality,  we 
can  never  know  whether  we  know  anything  truly  and  we 
can  not  explain  why  we  should  make  any  distinction  at  all 
between  ideas  and  reality,  between  phenomena  and  things 
in  themselves. 


II.  Pragmatism 

Pragmatism  is  the  name  that  has  been  made  fashionable 
by  William  James  and  others  for  a  theory  of  truth  which 
is  offered  as  a  correction  of  the  copy  theory. 

I  think  the  novelty  and  importance  of  the  pragmatic 
theory  of  truth  has  been  overemphasized,  probably  because 
its  progenitors,  who  were  psychologists,  were  overjoyed 
at  finding  a  way  out  of  the  subjective  world  of  the  copy 
theory  into  which  the  undue  subjectivism  of  Locke,  Des¬ 
cartes,  Hume,  and  even  Kant  had  kept  them  imprisoned  so 
long.  If  they  had  kept  company  more  faithfully  with  Plato, 
Aristotle,  and  Hegel,  they  would  not  have  been  immured  in 
the  prison  house  of  subjectivism 


THE  CRITERIA  OF  TRUTH 


533 


The  pragmatist  insists,  with  justice,  on  the  purposive  or 
instrumental  character  of  ideas.  Ideas,  he  insists,  are  not 
internal  copies  of  external  realities,  but  working  plans  of 
action,  devised  and  invented  by  man  to  remove  pains  and 
discomforts,  escape  dangers,  promote  his  affectional  and 
practical  interests,  maintain  and  enhance  his  own  well 
being.  The  pragmatist  is  an  evolutionist.  He  looks  upon 
mind  and  all  its  products  as  biological  instruments — like 
sharp  fangs  and  strong  jaws  and  swift  feet,  only  much 
more  powerful  and  supple  weapons  in  the  struggle  for 
existence.  Indeed,  he  admits  that  mind  has  the  strange 
power  of  creating  a  cultural  environment  by  which  human 

life  is  lifted  far  above  that  of  the  brutes.  Still  he  insists 

* 

that  reflective  thinking  would,  in  all  probability,  never  have 
arisen,  and  certainly  would  never  have  thriven,  if  the 
affectional  life  of  the  genus  homo  had  always  been  serene 
and  blissful  without  alloy,  if  his  desires  had  always  been 
satisfied  the  instant  they  made  themselves  felt  and  if  the 
satisfactions  had  never  left  him  with  a  bad  taste  in  the 
mouth,  if  promise  had  always  led  straight  to  fulfillment. 

Because  of  discordances,  discomforts,  pains,  because  of 
discrepancies  between  belief  and  experience,  expectation 
and  fulfillment,  thought  arises  and  continues  to  work  until 
the  jarring  discords  are  removed. 

‘  ‘  Thought  is  the  means  by  which  the  consciously  effected 
evolution  of  reality  goes  forward”  (Dewey).  The  only 
part  of  reality  which  we  know  and  are  concerned  with 
is  in  evolution.  “Reality  is  still  in  the  making  and  awaits 
a  part  of  its  complexion  from  the  future”  (William 
James).  In  fact,  for  the  pragmatist,  reality  is  just  the 
process  of  experience  itself  and  experience  is  the  result 
of  the  continuous  and  active  commerce  of  man  with  his 
natural  and  social  environment,  in  which  commerce,  in 
scecula  sceculorum,  he  remakes  both  environments  and  re¬ 
makes  them  again  and  again,  even  though  only  in  small  de- 


534 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


gree.  Thus  reality  is  the  joint  product  of  man’s  intelligent 
will  and  the  environing  nature.  There  is  no  eternal  nature 
of  things  which  the  mind  has  to  copy  or  gaze  at ;  or  if  there 
is,  it  is  ultra  vires ,  beyond  the  jurisdiction  of  the  court  of 
human  intellect.  The  world  that  thought  lives  and  works 
in  is  a  humanistically  colored  world,  a  world  that  has  en¬ 
gendered  minds  just  as  it  has  engendered  stomachs  and 
hands.  But,  of  course,  the  pragmatist  would  not  assert  that 
the  intellect  has  no  larger  or  more  varied  uses  than  the 
stomach,  although  he  would  doubtless  say  that  without  a 
stomach  the  mind  could  not  do  much  in  this  world. 

« 

But  the  pragmatist  is  not  a  materialist.  For  he  holds 
that  the  mind  is  a  very  important  kind  of  organic  be¬ 
havior.  It  is  active  and  experimental.  It  not  only  reacts 
to  stimuli  in  its  own  ways,  but  is  a  selective  and  success¬ 
fully  purposive  agent.  Ideas  are  not  inherently  true.  They 
are  not  eternal  verities.  They  are  made  true,  become  true, 
by  leading  to  all  sorts  of  satisfactory  results.  An  idea  of 
the  way  to  a  certain  place  to  which  you  want  to  go  be¬ 
comes  true  by  leading  you  there.  An  idea  of  a  certain 
ethical  or  chemical  process  becomes  true  by  leading  to  the 
promised  land  of  results.  An  idea  in  education  or  social 
reconstruction  is  made  true  by  being  put  to  work  and 
“delivering  the  goods. ”  “The  true,  to  put  it  very  briefly, 
is  only  the  expedient  in  the  way  of  our  thinking,  just  as 
the  right  is  only  the  expedient  in  the  way  of  our  behav¬ 
ing.  ’  ’ 1  If  you  can  cash  in  on  the  amount  indicated  by 
the  idea,  in  the  currency  that  the  idea  promises,  the  idea 
is  made  true.  Ideas  are  checks  drawn  on  the  bank  of 
experience.  If  they  are  returned  marked  “no  funds,” 
they  are  false.  If  the  money  is  counted  out  to  you  in  the 
shape  of  concrete  satisfactions,  they  are  true.  The  satis¬ 
factions  may  be  paid  in  terms  of  worldly  success,  honor, 


1  James,  Pragmatism,  p.  222. 


THE  CRITERIA  OF  TRUTH 


535 


fame,  wealth,  power ;  in  terms  of  the  gratification  of  per¬ 
sonal  affections,  love,  friendship,  comradeship ;  in  terms 
of  social  welfare,  in  terms  of  aesthetic  gratifications,  in 
terms  of  the  mind ’s  craving  for  intellectual  satisfaction ; 
even  in  terms  of  the  soul’s  craving  for  a  God  to  lean  on 
and  commune  with. 

The  pragmatic  method  means  “the  attitude  of  looking 
away  from  first  things ,  principles,  ‘categories,’  supposed 
necessities,  and  of  looking  towards  last  things,  fruits,  con¬ 
sequences,  facts.”2  “The  true  is  the  name  of  whatever 
proves  itself  to  be  good  in  the  way  of  belief,  and  good,  too, 
for  definite  assignable  reaso7is.”  3 *  “True  ideas  are  those 
that  we  can  assimilate,  validate,  corroborate,  and  verify. 
False  ideas  are  those  that  we  cannot.”*  “Truth  is  made 
just  as  health,  wealth,  and  strength  are  made,  in  the  course 
of  experience.”  5  For  thought  to  be  true  it  must  “agree” 
or  correspond  wfith  reality.  “  To  ‘  agree  ’  in  the  widest  sense 
with  a  reality  can  only  mean  to  be  guided  either  straight  up 
to  it  or  into  its  surroundings,  or  to  be  put  into  such  work¬ 
ing  touch  with  it  as  to  handle  either  it  or  something  con¬ 
nected  with  it  better  than  if  we  disagreed.  ” 6  “  The  es¬ 

sential  thing  is  the  process  of  being  guided.  Any  idea  that 
helps  us  to  deal,  whether  practically  or  intellectually,  with 
either  the  reality  or  its  belongings,  *  *  *  that  fits,  in  fact, 
and  adapts  our  life  to  the  reality’s  whole  setting,  will  agree 
sufficiently  to  meet  the  requirements.  It  will  hold  true  of 
that  realitv.  ’  ’  7 

‘  ‘  This  function  of  agreeable  leading  is  what  we  mean  by 
an  idea’s  verification.”8 

Truth  is  made  largely  out  of  previous  truths.  “Men’s 
beliefs  at  any  time  are  so  much  experience  funded.  But 


2  Ibid.,  pp.  54,  55. 

3  Ibid.,  p.  76. 

e  Ibid.,  p.  218. 

7  Ibid.,  p.  213. 


4  Ibid.,  p.  201. 

6  Ibid.,  pp.  212,  213. 
8  Ibid.,  p.  202. 


536 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


the  beliefs  are  themselves  parts  of  the  sum  total  of  the 
world’s  experience,  and  become  matter,  therefore,  for  the 
next  day’s  funding  operations.  So  far  as  reality  means 
experienceable  reality,  both  it  and  the  truths  men  gain 
about  it  are  everlastingly  in  process  of  mutation — muta¬ 
tion  towards  a  definite  goal,  it  may  be — but  still  muta¬ 
tion.”9  In  short,  reality  is  mutable  and  so  is  truth. 

These  quotations  require  no  comment  on  my  part.  They 
are  so  clear  as  to  be  wholly  self-explanatory.  Any  idea 
that  is  useful  in  enriching  and  harmonizing  experience, 
in  satisfying  the  interest  of  the  individual  or  society,  by 
performing  that  function  as  a  good  insirument,  becomes 
thus  far  true.  An  idea  that  cannot  be  put  to  work  is 
meaningless.  An  idea  that  will  not  yield  satisfaction  when 
put  to  work  is  false.  The  pragmatist  can  even  find  some 
uses  for  the  absolute  all-inclusive  knower  or  experiencer 
of  a  Hegel,  a  Bradley,  or  a  Royce,  although  James  did  not 
think  that  the  moral  and  religious  uses  of  the  absolute 
counterbalanced  its  practical,  moral,  and  scientific  use¬ 
lessness  and  so  rejected  it.10 

Pragmatism  is  right  in  insisting  on  the  instrumental 
value  of  ideas,  on  their  purposive  character,  and  in  de¬ 
manding  that  ideas  should  be  put  to  work  in  life,  in 
concrete  experience.  It  is  right  in  insisting  that  the  fact 
that  an  idea  works  in  experience  and  conduct  is  a  test 
of  its  truth.  Pragmatism  accounts  for  the  origin,  utility 
and  truth-value  of  many  of  our  ideas.  A  good  deal,  per¬ 
haps  the  greater  part,  of  knowledge  arises  and  is  validated 
precisely  in  the  ways  which  the  pragmatist  describes.  He 
propounds  a  sound  although  not  novel  method  of  testing 
the  truth  of  ideas — the  scientific  method  of  taking  ideas  as 
hypothesis,  deducing  conclusions  from  them,  and  testing 
these  deductions  by  putting  them  to  work  and  finding  they 


9  James,  Pragmatism,  pp.  224,  225. 

10  Ibid.,  pp.  291  ft’.,  and  A  Pluralistic  Universe,  Lecture  VIII. 


THE  CRITERIA  OF  TRUTH 


537 


lead  to  the  promised  concrete  results  in  experience.  If  a 
concept,  a  judgment,  a  belief  works  well  in  practice,  there 
must  be  something  true  in  it. 

James’  own  statement  of  pragmatism  was  too  individual¬ 
istic.  Ideas  may  work  well  for  individuals  in  terms  of 
satisfaction,  but  their  so  working  maj^  be  harmful  to  society 
in  the  long  run.  A  conscienceless  profiteer  may  make 
millions  from  the  nation’s  patriotism  in  time  of  war  and 
die  rich,  working  untold  injury  to  society.  John  Dewey 
emphasizes  the  social  test  of  working  and  thus  corrects 
James’  view.  And,  of  course,  the  social  and  long  run  satis¬ 
factions  as  tests,  are  logically  compatible  with  the  prag¬ 
matist  position.  But  even  the  later  pragmatists  have  not 
made  it  clear  as  to  how,  pragmatically,  the  conflicts  be¬ 
tween  individuals,  or  between  an  individual  and  a  social 
group,  as  to  the  respective  claims  for  satisfaction  of  their 
interests,  are  to  be  adjudicated. 

Pragmatism  talks  much  about  good  fruits  and  good  con¬ 
sequences,  but  it  has  failed  hitherto  to  formulate  any  com¬ 
prehensive  theory  of  how  relative  goodnesses  in  fruits 
or  consequences  are  to  be  judged.  It  seems  to  me  that  the 
pragmatist  must  admit  that  the  ability  of  the  stronger  or 
of  the  majority  to  dragoon  the  recalcitrant  individual  or 
minority  is  the  final  social  test.  If  expediency  is  to  rule 
both  in  practice  and  in  theory,  I  can  see  no  other  argument. 
Expediency  thus  becomes  an  euphonious  name  for  brute 
power,  analogous  to  the  “survival  of  the  fittest  in  the 
struggle  for  existence.”  Perhaps  this  is  the  ultimate  test, 
but  the  choicest  spirits  of  the  race  have  not  hitherto  thought 
so  and  I  for  one  cannot  think  so.  I  am  unable  to  admit  that 
the  right  is  always  on  the  side  of  the  biggest  battalions. 
Belgium  may  be  blotted  from  the  map  but  the  wrong  re¬ 
mains  eternally  a  wrong.  Hence  I  agree  with  Royce  11  that 

11  “The  Problem  of  Truth  in  the  Light  of  Recent  Discussion”  in 
William  James  and  other  Essays. 


538 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


there  are  absolute  truths  in  logic,  mathematics,  ethics,  his¬ 
tory,  and  experience ;  and  the  truths  of  logic,  mathematics, 
and  ethics  imply  that  there  is  an  absolute  creative,  rational 
will  which  is  their  ground  and  source.  “ Absolute’ ’  prag¬ 
matism  is  the  only  form  of  the  doctrine  that  is  in  harmony 
with  the  nature  of  logical  and  ethical  truth,  as  at  once 
volitional  or  purposive  and  drawing  its  character  and 
meaning  and  its  inherent  authority  from  the  determinate 
structure  of  the  absolute,  rational  and  ethical  will  or  pur¬ 
pose  involved  in  the  teleological  or  worthful  and  mean¬ 
ingful  order  of  reality. 

Pragmatism  takes  too  narrow,  too  provincial  a  view  of 
the  criteria  of  truth.  In  the  long  run  ideas  work  and 
yield  good  results  because  they  are  in  harmony  with  the 
actual  structure  of  reality.  And  there  is  useless — that  is, 
useless  from  any  present  view  of  individual  or  social  util¬ 
ities — knowledge.  The  story  is  told  of  a  great  mathema¬ 
tician  that,  having  worked  out  a  new  theorem,  he  said, 
“thank  God,  there  is  a  truth  that  no  one  can  make  any 
use  of.”  In  higher  mathematics,  in  history,  archaeology, 
and  science,  yes,  even  in  perceptual  experience,  there  are 
many  things  recognized  as  true  that  men  have  not  found 
any  use  for  beyond  the  satisfaction  of  knowing  them, 
wdiich  means  the  satisfaction  the  mind  has  in  being  in 
conscious  and  loyal  harmony  with  the  intelligible  order 
of  reality.  How  are  these  propositions  known  to  be  true? 
Either  because  men  cannot  help  perceiving  them,  as  I 
cannot  help  perceiving  the  hideous  and  useless  things 
that  deface  the  landscape  in  my  town,  or  because  they 
express  the  intuitively  recognized  objective  structure  of 
the  rational  will  in  man,  or  because  their  truth  follows 
by  the  laws  of  logical  consistency  from  some  other  proposi¬ 
tion,  definition  or  axiom  which  expresses  some  fact  of  the 
objective  rational  order.  It  may  be  that  use  will  be  found 


THE  CRITERIA  OF  TRUTH 


539 


for  every  truth  ultimately.  Let  us  hope  so.  If  the  world 
is  rational  and  just,  it  must  be  so. 

There  are  disagreeable  truths  which  we  must  face.  When 
my  banker  informs  me  that  my  account  is  already  over¬ 
drawn  and  I  have  no  money  to  put  in,  or  I  am  wholly 
bankrupt,  I  have  yet  to  find  the  person  to  whom  the  knowl¬ 
edge  of  the  truth  is  agreeable.  In  the  great  war,  we  had 
to  face  as  a  nation  discomforts,  sacrifice,  and  death  of 
many  of  our  choicest  sons  in  loyalty  to  a  cause.  The 
pragmatist  says  that  what  proves  satisfactory,  when  the 
returns  are  all  in,  will  be  true.  But,  in  the  matter  of  moral 
principles,  ofttimes  the  returns  are  never  all  in,  in  this 
world.  How  did  one  know  that  more  satisfaction  would 
ensue  to  anybody  if  one  went  to  the  war  and  sacrificed  one ’s 
self  for  one's  country  or  if  one  sent  one’s  son?  How  did 
one  know  that  one’s  family  or  even  the  third  generation 
to  come  would  be  happier?  One  did  not.  One  only  knew 
that  if  it  were  clearly  one’s  duty — one  ought  to  go,  one 
ought  to  send  one’s  son.  How  did  I  know  that  by  con¬ 
scripting  the  youth  of  this  land  to  fight  in  Europe  the  world 
will  be  made  safe  for  democracy  and  this  will  be  a  better 
world  ?  I  did  not  know.  I  only  hoped  so.  But  in  loyalty 
to  the  cause,  I  knew  that  we  could  not  shirk  the  issue. 
I  only  knew  that  since  we  were  convinced  of  the  justice 
of  our  case,  and  that  if  a  brutal  militaristic  autocracy 
triumphed  the  world  would  not  be  a  fit  place  for  our 
children  and  our  children’s  children  to  live  in,  therefore, 
we  ought  to  do  whatever  is  necessary  to  defend  that  cause. 

III.  Rational  Empiricism 

Knowledge  comes  from  several  sources.  What  one  per¬ 
ceives  or  feels,  one  perceives  or  feels  just  as  brute  fact. 
We  may  recognize,  examine  and  analyze  experience  very 
rigorously  but,  finally,  we  get  down  to  data  that  are  not 


540 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


further  analyzable.  I  see  the  light  and  feel  the  heat  and 
cold,  whether  these  be  agreeable  or  disagreeable.  I  appre¬ 
hend  impacts  and  motions  as  brute  facts.  Any  idea  in 
regard  to  experimental  facts  is  true  only  if  it  is  in  agree¬ 
ment  with  the  determinate  experience  or  experienceable 
facts.  The  facts  may  be  unsatisfactory  to  you  or  me,  but 
there  they  are. 

I  also  intuitively  recognize,  by  my  reason,  certain  truths 
of  logic  and  ethics.  The  elementary  propositions  and  ax¬ 
ioms  or  postulates  of  mathematics  and  logic,  on  careful 
reflection,  appear  to  me  true  whether  you  or  I  care  for 
them  or  not.  They  express  the  intellect’s  native  ways  of 
working.  They  reflect  the  rational  structure  of  reality. 
The  statement  that  two  contradictory  propositions  cannot 
be  true  simultaneously  and  in  the  same  situation  appears 
to  me  self-evident.  I  cannot  conceive  a  world  in  which  it 
should  be  false.  In  such  a  world  “true”  and  “false” 
would  have  no  meaning,  and  it  would  not  even  be  a  world. 

Thus  there  are  ideas  that  are  true  because  they  are  in 
agreement  with  the  given  or  finite  facts,  and  there  are 
ideas  that  are  true  because  they  express  the  meanings  of  the 
mind’s  own  reflective  intuitions,  of  its  own  rational  pro¬ 
cedure  in  thinking  about  its  world.  So  far  as  these  truths 
go  they  are  absolute.  Further  than  this,  some  minds  have 
a  passionate  hunger  for  putting  truths  together  into  a 
coherent  whole,  for  organizing  ideas  into  a  system.  This 
ideal  of  truth-seeking  is  the  philosophical  ideal.  It  is  the 
harmonious  organization  of  all  separate  truths  into  a  co¬ 
herent  whole.  James  really  admitted  these  criticisms  when 
he  said  that  we  are  coerced  by  the  determinate  order  of 
fact  and  of  intuitively  recognized  truths  of  abstract  rela¬ 
tionships,  and  when  he  said  that  intellectual  consistency 
is  the  most  imperious  claimant  of  all  for  satisfaction.  The 
fact  is  that  our  purposes  and  our  interests  do  not  always 
get  or  deserve  satisfaction.  Sometimes  they  are  shattered 


THE  CRITERIA  OF  TRUTH 


541 


into  fragments  and  remade,  by  the  logic  of  events,  into 
larger  purposes  and  meanings.  Reality  is  in  mutation,  but 
there  is  a  logic  of  events,  a  determinate  order  of  mutation. 
The  process  of  reality  has  a  specific  structure,  and  part  of 
our  truth  consists  in  apprehending  and  symbolizing  that 
structure  as  it  is.  Mind  in  us  has  a  logical  and  ethical 
structure.  Our  images,  concepts,  theories,  and  assump¬ 
tions  change,  to  fit  enlarged  and  finer  apprehensions  of  the 
factual  order  and  to  meet  the  mutations  in  that  order. 
But,  through  all  the  changes  and  chances  in  the  mental 
life  of  ideas,  through  all  the  scrapping  of  old  ones  and  the 
making  of  new  ones  to  fit  the  facts,  there  run  certain  fun¬ 
damental  ways  of  thinking  and  acting ;  the  elementary  prin¬ 
ciples  and  postulates  of  knowledge  and  conduct.  It  would 
belong  to  a  treatise  on  logic  and  epistemology  to  discuss 
these  theoretical  principles  fully,  but  we  may  state  the 
principal  ones  briefly — the  logical  identity  of  objects  of 
thought  with  themselves  or  the  invariant  character  of  these 
objects,  the  impossibility  of  admitting  the  truth  of  two 
contradictory  propositions,  the  self -evidencing  quality  of 
the  elementary  propositions  of  logic  and  mathematics,  the 
rationally  evident  character  of  our  most  universal  and 
fundamental  moral  judgments,  the  demand  of  the  mind 
for  the  organization  of  knowledge  into  a  coherent  whole 
ivhich  gives  us  the  logically  self-consistent  systems  of  mathe¬ 
matics  and  which,  in  the  form  of  the  principle  of  sufficient 
reason  or  ground,  appears  in  our  insistent  need  in  science 
to  discover  the  relevancy  of  facts  to  one  another,  to  classify 
facts  and  connect  them  in  a  system  of  causally  related  or 
reciprocally  interdependent  elements.  One  could  sum  up 
this  matter  as  follows — the  absolute  postulates  of  knowledge 
are  the  logical  identity  of  every  object  of  thought  ivith 
itself,  and  the  harmonious  organization  or  relevancy  of  all 
true  judgments  to  one  another  in  a  systematic  whole.  And 
there  are  ethical  principles  which  are  valid  whether  you 


542 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


and  I  obey  them  or  not,  whether  we  find  that  they  satisfy 
our  concrete  interests  or. not.  We  may  as  individuals  or 
social  groups  be  loyal  or  disloyal  to  honesty,  justice,  love, 
fellowship,  loyalty  itself,  but  our  actions  do  not  make  these 
qualities  right  if  expedient,  and  wrong  if  inexpedient.  If 
expediency  be  the  highest  good,  there  is  no  highest  good. 
Plato  was  right  in  holding  that  there  are  values  and  rela¬ 
tionships,  principles  of  moral  and  rational  order,  that  give 
meaning  and  status  to,  and  that  endure  through,  the  tem¬ 
poral  flux  of  human  experience. 

This  generation  has  been  permeated  and  captivated  in 
its  thinking  by  the  thought  of  evolution,  ceaseless  flux  and 
relativity  in  all  things.  Let  me  remind  you  that  there  is  no 
meaning  in  evolution,  or  even  in  flux  and  relativity,  unless 
there  be  an  enduring  teleological  order  of  meanings,  by 
reference  to  which  we  measure  and  judge  the  dates  and 
relations  and  meanings  and  values  of  the  tides  and  times 
of  human  circumstance  and  deed,  and  of  physical  circum¬ 
stance  as  well. 

The  fullest  criteria  of  truth  are  the  coherence  of  ideas 
with  experiences  and  the  coherence  of  ideas,  as  interpreta¬ 
tions  of  experiences,  with  one  another.  The  ideal  of  knowl¬ 
edge  is  the  harmonious  organization  of  thinking  and  experi¬ 
ence,  in  which  thinking  appears  as  the  instrument  for  the 
organization  or  interpretation  of  experience,  by  which  ex- 
X?erience  becomes  conscious  of  its  own  meanings  and  by 
which  its  own  enrichment  and  more  harmonious  fulfillment 
are  furthered.  This  ideal,  although  never  fully  realized,  is 
the  animating  motive  of  the  thinker  at  his  best. 

Reality  is  a  teleological  and  self-organizing  system,  and 
thinking  is  the  chiefest  instrument  for  the  maintenance 
and  enhancement  of  this  system.  The  function  of  thought 
is  both  to  discover  the  existing  relations  or  relevancies  of 
things  to  one  another  and  to  promote  the  increase  of  these 
relationships.  Thinking  is  the  chief  instrument  of  organ- 


THE  CRITERIA  OF  TRUTH 


543 


ization  in  a  purposively  ordered  world,  a  world  controlled 
by  a  rational  and  ethical  order,  as  I  believe. 

References 

*  Avey,  A.  E.,  Readings  in  Philosophy,  Chapter  XXV. 

*  Bawden,  H.  H.,  The  Principles  of  Pragmatism. 

Bradley,  F.  H.,  Appearance  and  Reality. 

*  Carr,  H.  W.,  The  Problem  of  Truth.  (An  excellent,  brief 

discussion.) 

*  Dewey,  John,  Studies  in  Logical  Theory ,  and  the  articles 

“Beliefs  and  Realities’’  and  “The  Experimental  Theory  of 
Knowledge”  in  The  Influence  of  Darwin  on  Philosophy. 
Dewey  and  Others,  Creative  Intelligence. 

Hegel,  Logic,  translated  by  Wallace. 

*  James,  William,  Pragmatism  (especially  Lectures  II,  III,  V, 

and  VI)  and  The  Meaning  of  Truth. 

Joachim,  H.  H.,  The  Nature  of  Truth. 

Marvin,  W.  T.,  A  First  Book  in  Metaphysics. 

*  Moore,  A.  W.,  Pragmatism  and  Its  Critics. 

Royce,  Josiah,  “The  Problem  of  Truth”  in  William  James 
and  Other  Essays. 

Russell,  Bertrand,  The  Problems  of  Philosophy,  Chapters 
X,  XI,  XII  and  XIII. 

Schiller,  F.  C.  S.,  Humanism,  Studies  in  Humanism,  and 
Formal  Logic. 

*  Spaulding,  E.  G.,  The  New  Rationalism. 

Sturt,  H.,  and  Others,  Personal  Idealism . 


CHAPTER  XXXI 


OTHER  PHILOSOPHICAL  DISCIPLINES 

The  System  of  Philosophy 

The  central  and  fundamental  philosophical  discipline, 
metaphysics,  is  the  theory  of  the  nature  or  structure  and 
meaning  of  reality  as  a  whole.  While  writers  may  show 
philosophical  insights  in  various  special  fields  and,  to  the 
extent  of  these  insights,  deserve  the  name  philosophers,  a 
system  of  thought  can  be  properly  called  a  philosophy  only 
when  its  various  aspects  are  built  upon  and  articulated 
with  a  metaphysics  or  doctrine  of  reality.  Metaphysics 
includes,  as  special  divisions : — cosmology  or  philosophy  of 
nature,  whose  chief  problems  are  the  nature  or  meaning 
of  space,  time,  matter,  motion,  and  evolution ;  metapsy¬ 
chology,  or  philosophy  of  selves  and  society;  epistemology, 
or  philosophy  of  knowledge ;  and  axiology,  or  philosophy 
of  values.  These  special  divisions  of  metaphysics  cannot, 
however,  be  pursued  successfully  in  isolation  from  one 
another.  The  subject  matter  of  the  present  work  has  con¬ 
sisted  :  (1)  in  tracing  the  emergence  and  development  of 
the  fundamental  problems  and  theories  of  metaphysics, 
ethics,  and  the  theory  of  knowledge ;  and  the  interrelation¬ 
ships  of  these  subjects;  and  (2)  in  discussing  the  present 
status  of  these  problems  and  theories.  It  now  remains  for 
us  to  consider  briefly  the  respective  fields,  and  relations 
to  general  philosophy  or  metaphysics,  of  the  remaining 
philosophical  disciplines.  These  are :  logic,  aesthetics,  and 
the  philosophy  of  religion.  Before  proceeding  with  this 

544 


OTHER  PHILOSOPHICAL  DISCIPLINES  545 


matter,  it  is  desirable  that  an  indication  be  given  as  to  the 
relation  between  philosophy  and  psychology. 

I.  Psychology  and  Philosophy 

There  is  no  unanimity  of  opinion  among  the  psycholo¬ 
gists  as  to  the  proper  field  and  methods  of  psychology.  The 
point  on  which  there  is  nearest  approach  to  agreement  is 
that  psychology  is  not  the  science  of  the  soul,  that  it  has 
no  concern  with  the  question  whether  man  is  a  soul  or 
permanently  unified  self.  It  is  also  pretty  generally  agreed 
that  psychology  is  as  much  an  independent  science  as,  say, 
chemistry,  and  therefore,  like  any  other  special  science,  is 
independent  of  philosophy.  Still  there  must  be  some  good 
reason,  other  than  the  slow  development  of  the  scienoe 
itself,  why  psychology  has  remained  so  long  in  closer  asso¬ 
ciation  with  philosophy  than  the  other  sciences.  Before 
we  can  discover  this  reason,  we  must  essay  a  statement  as 
to  the  province  of  psychology. 

It  used  to  be  said  that  the  business  of  psychology  is  to 
analyze,  describe,  and  correlate  the  elementary  constitu¬ 
ents  and  processes  of  consciousness,  to  determine  in  detail 
the  structure  of  consciousness  in  all  its  forms  and  stages. 
This,  the  standpoint  of  structuralism,  was  the  classical 
standpoint  until  after  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  when  evolutionary  biology  began  more  and  more 
to  hold  sway  over  men’s  thinking  about  human  nature. 
Of  course  it  had  been  already  recognized  that  psychology 
is  concerned,  too,  with  the  relation  between  consciousness 
and  the  nervous  system,  or,  in  general  terms,  between  mind 
and  body. 

The  rapid  development  of  the  evolution  hypothesis  led 
to  a  change  of  emphasis  in  psychology.  Mental  processes 
began  to  be  viewed  as  instruments  of  adaptation  to  the 
environment,  as  tools  for  the  more  successful  adjustment 


546 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


of  the  relationships  between  man  and  nature,  and  the  indi¬ 
vidual  man  and  society.  This  is  the  standpoint  of  func¬ 
tionalism,  which  does  not  deny  all  value  to  structural  analy¬ 
sis  of  mind  but  makes  such  analysis  subservient  to  the 
determination  of  the  biological  or  life-serving  functions  of 
the  mind.  The  mind  in  all  its  phases,  whether  clearly 
conscious,  subconscious,  and  perhaps  unconscious,  consists 
of  special  types  of  functional  adjustments  of  the  organ¬ 
ism.  William  James’  great  Tvork,  The  Principles  of  Psy¬ 
chology,  was  the  most  influential  in  making  this  change  of 
emphasis.  Herbert  Spencer’s  Principles  of  Psychology  is 
written  chiefly  from  the  same  standpoint.  Lately  a  third 
standpoint  has  arisen — behaviorism .  The  ultraradical  be- 
haviorist  denies  that  consciousness  is  a  fruitful  or  even 
legitimate  subject  of  study.  He  proposes  to  consider  only 
the  objective  or  physical  side  of  behavior.  The  moderate 
behaviorist  admits  that  the  most  important  data  for  psy¬ 
chology  are  those  obtained  from  the  study  of  conscious 
thinking  organisms,  but  he  insists  that  psychology  is  pri¬ 
marily  the  science  of  human  behavior.  I  am  of  the  opinion 
that  the  psychologist  cannot  afford  to  neglect  permanently 
any  one  of  these  standpoints.  Psychology,  as  I  understand 
it,  has  for  its  central  domain  the  systematic  investigation  of 
the  conscious  and  intelligent  behavior  of  human  individuals. 
To  successfully  carry  on  this  work  it  cannot  afford  to  leave 
out  of  account,  either  the  purposive  adaptation  functions 
which  the  mind  of  the  individual  performs,  or  the  struc¬ 
tural  analysis  of  mental  complexes,  such  as  perceptions, 
memories,  images,  judgments,  conceptions,  instincts,  emo¬ 
tions,  and  sentiments,  into  their  elementary  features. 

What,  then,  is  the  right  relation  between  psychology 
and  philosophy  ?  Psychology  is  a  special  science,  inasmuch 
as  it  studies  the  behavior  of  the  conscious  individual  in 
relation  to  the  physical  order  and  the  social  order,  without 
raising  the  metaphysical  questions  as  to  how  one  is  to  con- 


OTHER  PHILOSOPHICAL  DISCIPLINES  547 


ceive,  ultimately ,  the  nature  of  the  self  in  relation  to  the 
body  and  the  relation  of  the  psycho-physical  individual  or 
group  of  individuals  to  the  world  as  a  whole ;  in  so  far  as 
it  describes  the  process  of  thinking,  without  attempting  to 
determine  what  are  the  final  norms  or  criteria  of  knowl¬ 
edge  ;  in  so  far  as  it  describes  the  processes  of  volition, 
without  attempting  to  determine  the  valid  norms  or  stand¬ 
ards  of  conduct ;  and  in  so  far  as  it  describes  the  processes 
of  esthetic  feeling,  without  raising  the  question  as  to  the 
place  of  beauty  in  reality.  But  when  psychology  does 
attempt  to  deal  with  the  ultimate  problems  of  the  relation 
of  mind  and  body,  of  self  and  world,  of  the  criteria  of 
truth  and  goodness  and  beauty  in  the  universe,  then  it 
passes  into  philosophy ;  it  passes  into  metaphysics,  ethics, 
logic,  epistemology,  and  aesthetics.  Moreover,  it  is  not  easy 
for  the  psychologist  to  avoid  raising  the  philosophical  issues. 
Psychology  is  concerned  with  such  questions  as  these — 
the  nature  of  conscious  life,  with  its  chief  aspects,  namely : 
feeling,  thought,  and  volition;  the  genesis  of  voluntary 
action  from  impulse,  of  emotion  and  sentiment  from  the 
primary  affections  of  pleasure-pain  and  desire  and  aver¬ 
sion,  and  with  the  development  of  cognition  from  rudi¬ 
mentary  perception  up  to  the  highest  forms  of  imagination 
and  conceptual  generalization ;  with  the  nature  of  the  sub¬ 
conscious,  and  the  relations  between  the  conscious  and  the 
subconscious ;  with  the  relations  between  the  mind  and  the 
nervous  system,  and  between  the  mind  and  the  bodily 
processes  as  a  whole;  with  the  relations  between  the  con¬ 
scious  organism  as  a  whole  and  its  social  and  physical 
environments.  All  these  problems  are  of  cardinal  import 
for  metaphysics  and  ethics  and  social  philosophy.  Indeed 
any  attitude  taken  by  a  psychologist  on  any  one  of  these 
problems  involves,  straightway,  a  definite  attitude  towards 
some  fundamental  problem  of  human  conduct  and  belief — 
in  short,  towards  some  vital  question  in  ethics  and  social 


548 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


philosophy,  in  religious  belief  and  conduct,  or  in  meta¬ 
physics  (which  is  simply  the  final  clearing  house  for  all 
such  questions).  It  is  useless  and  confusing  for  a  psychol¬ 
ogist  to  waive  aside  the  final  practical,  ethical,  and  meta¬ 
physical  implications  of  his  theories.  Since  psychology, 
if  it  have  a  definite  field  at  all,  is  the  science  of  human 
nature,  and  since  philosophy  is  the  attempt,  by  thorough 
and  comprehensive  reflection,  to  think  out  the  place  and 
meaning  of  human  nature  in  the  universe,  psychology  runs 
into  philosophy  more  quickly  and  at  more  points  than  any 
other  natural  science.  Biology,  the  science  which  is  next 
of  kin  to  psychology  among  the  natural  sciences,  is  like¬ 
wise  next  to  it  in  the  closeness  and  frequency  of  its  con¬ 
tacts  with  philosophy.  But  psychology,  unlike  biology,  is 
more  than  a  science  of  life  in  the  raw.  As  the  science  of 
human  nature,  psychology  is  concerned  with  man  as  the 
creator,  sustainer,  and  subject  of  culture — that  is,  with 
the  whole  broad  stream  of  human  civilization. 

Inasmuch  as  the  problems  of  philosophy  all  center  in 
the  questions  as  to  the  place  of  the  self  and  societj7'  in  the 
universe  of  reality,  it  is  quite  evident  why  psychology  has 
always  lived,  and  should  continue  to  live,  in  intimate  asso¬ 
ciation  with  philosopli3r.  It  is  not  for  the  permanent  good 
of  either  discipline  that  they  should  be  kept  asunder.  With¬ 
out  philosophy  psychology ’s  work  becomes  a  blind  traf¬ 
ficking  with  physical  instruments  and  physiological  meas¬ 
urements.  Without  empirical  psychological  foundations 
philosophy  becomes  a  dialectical  exercise  in  spinning  log¬ 
ical  cobwebs. 

II.  Logic 

Logic  is  the  systematic  investigation  of  the  fundamental 
processes  or  methods  by  which  thought  arrives  at  truth, 
or  the  right  methods  of  making  judgments  and  inferences. 
Psychology  likewise  studies  the  processes  of  knowing,  but 


OTHER  PHILOSOPHICAL  DISCIPLINES  549 


from  a  different  standpoint.  Psychology  is  concerned  to 
analyze  and  describe  the  cognitive  processes  simply  as 
mental  events  which  occur  in  individual  minds  along  with 
other  kinds  of  mental  events.  It  is  not  the  aim  of  psy¬ 
chology  either  to  formulate  the  most  general  canons  or 
norms  of  correct  thinking  or  to  formulate  all  the  various 
methods  by  which  these  canons  are  applied  in  the  actual 
work  of  science.  But  this  is  just  what  logic  aims  to  do.  It 
is  true  that  logic  studies  actual  processes  of  thinking  and 
therefore  makes  use  of  psychology,  but  logic  finds  its  mate¬ 
rial  chiefly  in  the  analysis  of  typical  cases  of  correct  think¬ 
ing  as  exemplifying  the  norms  of  knowledge.  Hence,  fair 
samples  of  correct  thinking  in  the  practical  affairs  of  life 
and  in  all  the  sciences  furnish  the  materials  of  logic.  It 
studies  analytically  such  cases  in  order  to  determine  the 
fundamental  procedures,  in  judgment  and  inference,  that 
are  involved  in  them. 

In  short,  whereas  psychology  studies  thoughts  as  natural 
events  that  occur,  along  with  other  events,  in  the  minds  or 
heads  of  individual  agents,  logic  studies  thought  as  that 
function  of  mind  which  is  objective  and  universal,  or,  in 
other  words,  as  the  instrument  by  which  truth  is  discov¬ 
ered  and  apprehended.  By  truth  is  meant  propositions 
that  are  objectively  valid  or  valid  for  all  normal  thinking 
beings  under  similar  conditions  of  experience.  Thus,  while 
all  sorts  of  thoughts  or  ideas,  normal  and  abnormal,  sane 
and  insane,  are  grists  for  the  psychological  mill,  the  logi¬ 
cian  is  interested  only  in  thought  as  the  normal  and  norma¬ 
tive  function,  by  the  exercise  of  which  objective,  universal, 
and  mutually  consistent  propositions  are  found  or  grasped. 
By  objective  truth  is  meant,  in  logic  and  science,  proposi¬ 
tions  that  are  valid  independent  of  the  accidents,  whims, 
idiosyncrasies,  of  particular  selves ;  by  the  universality  of 
truth  is  meant  the  same  thing ;  that  is,  that  a  proposition, 
if  true,  must  be  true  for  all  who  can  think  in  accordance 


550 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


with  the  norms  or  principles  of  logic.  By  mutual  con¬ 
sistency  is  meant  that  true  propositions,  whether  they  be 
about  particular  matters  of  fact,  or  about  mathematical 
and  scientific  principles,  cannot  contradict  one  another. 
In  so  far  as  our  beliefs  and  the  theories  of  our  sciences 
are  inconsistent,  thus  far  we  have  not  reached  the  truth. 

Thought  has  two  chief  stages — judgment  and  inference. 
A  judgment  is  the  most  elemental  act  of  logical  thinking. 
It  consists  in  the  assertion,  either  in  affirmative  or  negative 
form,  that  a  predicate  holds  good  of  a  subject.  The  predi¬ 
cate  always  involves  a  universal,  meaning,  or  “what” ; 
that  is,  the  predicate  is  always  a  general  term.  For  exam¬ 
ple,  in — “Socrates  was  a  Greek  philosopher,”  “This  room 
is  warm,”  “Greek  philosopher”  and  “warm”  are  uni¬ 
versal,  affirmed  to  hold  good  of  subjects  or  “thats.  ” 
Judgments  are  classified  in  various  ways;  with  respect  to 
their  quality,  as  affirmative  or  negative ;  with  respect  to 
their  quantity,  as  universal,  individual,  particular,  or  indefi¬ 
nite;  with  respect  to  the  kind  or  mode  of  assertion,  as  cate¬ 
gorical,  hypothetical,  problematical,  disjunctive.  There 
are  other  important  ways  of  classifying  judgments  that 
are  too  complex  to  be  entered  into  here.  An  important 
problem  in  regard  to  the  nature  of  judgment  is  this — does 
the  subject  of  judgment  always  refer,  directly  or  indi¬ 
rectly,  to  reality,  that  is,  to  the  world  of  real  existence? 
If  it  does,  then  what  is  the  logical  status  of  judgments  in 
regard  to  imaginary  and  contradictory  objects  of  thought? 
How  do  judgments  in  regard  to  centaurs,  hippigriffs,  grins 
without  cats,  ropes  of  sand,  perpetual  motion,  et  cetera, 
refer  to  reality  ?  I  refer  to  these  matters  merely  in  order  to 
indicate  the  scope  of  logic. 

Inference  is  the  passage  of  thought,  always  by  means 
of  a  universal,  from  one  judgment  to  another.  Inference 
involves,  either  the  transformation  of  a  single  judgment 
into  a  different  one  that  follows  from  it  (immediate  infer- 


OTHER  PHILOSOPHICAL  DISCIPLINES 


551 


ence)  or  the  combination  of  two  or  more  judgments,  called 
the  premises,  from  which  a  new  judgment,  the  conclusion, 
is  obtained. 

The  logical  problem  of  inference  is  to  state  the  laws  or 
universal  principles,  to  which  the  various  types  of  infer¬ 
ence  must  conform  in  order  to  be  valid.  There  are  many 
types  of  inference,  from  the  precise  and  exact  procedures 
of  pure  mathematics,  through  the  less  exact  sciences,  such 
as  biology  and  psychology,  to  the  various  degrees  of  prob¬ 
ability  which  judgments  in  historical  inquiry  and  in  prac¬ 
tical  life  have.  These  types  we  cannot  consider  here.  In 
inference  one  may  start  from  a  single  particular  fact  of 
sense  perception,  memory,  or  historical  record,  or  one  may 
start  from  precise  and  universal  principles  as  in  mathe¬ 
matics  or  physics.  But  all  cases  of  inference  have  this  in 
common — in  no  case  can  inference  take  place  without  the 
employment  of  universals.  Thus,  the  controversies  which 
have  been  waged,  from  the  days  of  Plato  down  to  the 
present,  as  to  the  status  of  universals  or  general  concepts, 
as  to  whether  they  are  purely  subjective  formations  of  the 
individual  human  mind,  or,  at  best,  mere  social  conven¬ 
tions;  or,  on  the  other  hand,  have  objective  foundations  in 
the  nature  of  things;  so  far  from  being  an  amusement  in 
the  spinning  of  cobwebs  by  “highbrows”  having  no  use¬ 
ful  employment,  are  controversies  which  go  down  to  the 
very  foundations,  and  concern  the  very  existence,  of  all 
science  and  all  practical  social  order.  If  universals  are 
but  the  subjective  figments  of  human  brains  or,  like  bile 
or  saliva,  are  but  by-products  of  physiological  processes, 
then  all  science,  all  ethical  values,  all  social  values,  all 
aesthetic  values,  must  go  by  the  board.  But  such  a  prop¬ 
osition  would,  by  the  hypothesis,  itself  be  a  physiological 
by-product  and  not  truer  than  any  other.  There  would  be 
no  real  distinction  between  truth  and  error.  The  only 
reasonable  conclusion  is  that  universals,  relations,  or  mean- 


552 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


ings,  inhere  in,  indeed  constitute,  the  very  texture  or  pat¬ 
tern  of  objective  reality,  and  that  there  must  be  a  logic 
in  the  very  substance  and  structure  of  reality,  of  which 
our  human  logic  is  the  partial  and  growing  apprehension. 
The  validity  of  all  human  values  and,  indeed,  the  everyt 
day  utility  of  thought,  as  well  as  the  ongoing  of  the  social 
order,  presuppose  the  reality  of  universals,  that  is,  the 
logical  structure  of  reality.  Logic  is  just  the  most  com¬ 
prehensive  formulation  of  the  principles  and  procedure 
by  which  the  human  mind  can  apprehend  and  adjust  itself 
to  the  logic  of  reality. 

It  is  evident  that  right  judgment  and  inference,  as 
exemplified  in  concrete  cases,  presuppose  and  imply  certain 
most  fundamental  principles  of  knowledge.  These  are  the 
laws  or  principles  of  all  sound  thinking.  Such  principles 
are :  the  principle  of  coherence  or  freedom  from  contra¬ 
diction  (two  contradictory  propositions  cannot  both  be 
true)  ;  the  principle  of  identity  (a  logical  subject  of  thought 
must  be  identical  with  itself)  ;  the  principle  of  sufficient 
ground  or  causation  (there  must  be  a  sufficient  ground  for 
every  event)  ;  the  principle  of  uniformity  (the  same  condi¬ 
tions  or  causes  will  have  the  same  effects).  Since  this  is 
but  a  brief  indication  of  the  province  of  logic,  I  shall  not 
discuss  whether  the  above  named  are  the  only  ultimate 
fundamental  principles  of  logic.  It  will  be  obvious  to  the 
thoughtful  reader  that  the  above  principles  are  presup¬ 
posed  in  all  genuinely  scientific  or  systematically  thought¬ 
ful  procedure  of  the  mind  and  that,  therefore,  a  sound 
logical  theory  is  not  only  implied  in  every  kind  of  scien¬ 
tific  procedure,  but  as  well  that  it  is  the  primal  condition 
of  sound  philosophy.  Every  true  judgment  and  inference 
in  practical  affairs,  as  well  as  in  science,  is  a  bit  of  applied 
logic ;  and  metaphysics  is  an  applied  logic  of  the  whole  uni¬ 
verse  of  reality  or  experience. 

Logic  is  frequently  divided,  in  elementary  textbooks, 
into  two  parts — deductive  and  inductive  logic.  Such  a 


OTHER  PHILOSOPHICAL  DISCIPLINES  553 


division,  while  it  may  have  practical  pedagogical  justifica¬ 
tion,  overlooks  the  fact  that,  in  the  actual  work  of  science, 
deduction  and  induction  are  both  involved  and,  while  some 
sciences  are  more  inductive  or  deductive  than  others,  no 
science  is  purely  either  the  one  or  the  other. 

III.  Esthetics 

Aesthetics  is  the  philosophy  of  aesthetic  feeling  and  judg¬ 
ment.  Since  Kant  ’s  Critique  of  Judgment  was  written  it 
has  been  recognized  as  a  division  of  philosophy.  We  may 
investigate  the  psychological  and  physiological  conditions 
of  aesthetic  feeling  and,  thus  far,  aesthetics  is  a  branch  of 
psychology  and  physiology.  We  may  consider  the  history 
of  aesthetic  appreciation  in  relation  to  the  history  of  art 
and,  in  this  regard,  aesthetics  is  a  branch  of  the  history  of 
culture.  But  we  may  also  ask,  what  is  the  significance  of 
aesthetic  feeling  and  judgment  with  reference  to  man’s 
place  in  the  universe?  Does  the  fact  that  the  sounding 
cataract  haunts  one  like  a  passion,  that  one  feels  oneself 
to  be  a  part  of  the  mountains,  seas,  and  sky ;  in  short,  does 
the  whole  human  reaction  in  which  we  feel  with  Words¬ 
worth 


“a  presence  far  more  deeply  interfused,  a  motion 
and  a  spirit  which  impels  all  thinking  things,  all 
objects  of  all  thought,” 

does  this  aesthetic  reaction  to  nature  mean  perhaps  that 
nature  is  the  expression  of  a  life,  of  whose  rich  and 
harmonious  meanings  these  sympathetic  feelings  of  ours 
for  nature  are  the  echoes  or  adumbrations  ?  Is  beauty 
an  avenue  to  the  vision  of  reality?  Does  it  unlock  gates 
otherwise  closed,  by  which,  even  though  intermittently, 
we  are  permitted  to  enter  into  contact  with  reality  in 
some  of  its  glory?  Or  are  all  our  feelings  for  nature,  our 
sense  of  a  divine  mystery  half  revealed,  half  concealed  in 
the  sunset,  the  mountains,  the  forest  brook,  the  quiet  lake, 


554 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


*  and  fhe  majestic  sea,  merely  subjective  reverberations  in 
our  organisms  of  a  world  that  in  itself  is  but  the  stony  and 
insensate  realm  of  mass  particles  in  motion  or  the  dead 
and  unfeeling  completeness  of  some  static  absolute  ?  These 
questions  are  hints  as  to  the  metaphysical  problem  sug¬ 
gested  by  man ’s  aesthetic  relation  to  nature ;  and  similar 
questions  arise  from  a  consideration  of  the  ceaseless  striv¬ 
ing  of  man  to  express  and  satisfy  his  emotion  in  art  forms 
of  beauty,  sublimity,  and  terror,  and  from  the  considera¬ 
tion  of  the  refining,  purifying,  healing,  and  refreshing 
influences  which  have  come  to  men  through  converse  with 
nature  and  art.  It  is  beyond  the  scope  of  this  introduction 
to  discuss  these  questions.  I  must  leave  the  matter  with 
the  suggestion  that,  perhaps,  the  painters,  the  sculptors, 
the  musicians  and  the  poets,  apprehend  an  aspect  of  reality 
that  is  hidden  from  the  eyes  of  the  dry-as-dust  scientist  or 
arid  dialectician.  It  is  my  own  conviction,  one  that  has 
grown  upon  me  with  the  years,  that  the  aesthetic  experi¬ 
ences  are  more  than  subjective  solaces  or  illusory  refuges 
from  the  “fretful  stir  unprofitable  and  the  fever  of  this 
world”;  that  the  beauty  and  the  grandeur  as  felt  in  nature, 
in  human  life  and  art,  are  forefelt  apprehensions,  though 
intermittent  and  fragmentary,  of  an  order,  a  harmony,  a 
concrete,  and  meaningful  life  that  belongs  somehow  to  the 
heart  of  things.  The  true  greatness  of  poets  such  as  Words¬ 
worth,  Shelley,  and  Whitman,  and  prose  writers  such  as 
Ruskin  and  Thoreau,  resides  in  the  fact  that  they  have 
been  prophets  of  the  aesthetic  vision  of  a  higher  reality 
beyond  and  yet  interwoven  with  the  dumb  shows  of  sense. 
The  same  fundamental  notion  of  living  order  or  a  har¬ 
monious  organization  of  experience  is  the  basic  motif  of 
science  and  logic  which  aim,  not  at  reducing  individual 
centers  of  activity  and  experience  to  illusions,  but  at  find¬ 
ing  the  world  to  be  an  ordered  or  organized  realm  of  indi¬ 
viduals.  And  the  practical,  moral,  and  social  activities  of 


OTHER  PHILOSOPHICAL  DISCIPLINES  555 


man  have  the  same  aim — to  construct  a  harmonious,  well 
organized  whole  of  living  centers  of  experience  and  deed — 
the  ideal  society,  in  which  the  law  of  each  member’s  being 
is  fulfilled  by  expansion  into  harmonious  action  and  feel¬ 
ing  with  the  whole,  as  the  fulfillment  of  the  law  of  the 
whole  through  the  individuality  of  each.  Thus  aesthetic 
experience  interprets  and  fulfills,  from  the  standpoint  of 
feeling,  the  vocation  of  man  which,  more  abstractly,  or  in 
more  formal  shape,  urges  on  his  theoretical  and  his  prac¬ 
tical  life  activities.  At  this  point  the  transition  to  the 
consideration  of  the  place  of  religion  in  philosophical  sys¬ 
tem  is  readily  suggested. 

IV.  The  Philosophy  of  Religion 

Religion  in  its  most  significant  forms  is  the  affirmation 
of  the  supremacy  in  the  order  of  reality  of  all  the  organ¬ 
ized  and  coherent  values  pertaining  to  the  life  of  man  in 
society.  Religion  idealizes  man’s  values  as  a  socialized 
individual,  or  as  a  society  of  individuals  regenerated  and 
redeemed  through  participation  in  the  common  life.  Relig¬ 
ion  affirms  that  the  system  of  ideal  values  not  only  must 
be  the  paramount  goal  of  human  life,  but  as  well  that  these 
values,  in  their  organic  wholeness  as  fulfilled  in  the  social¬ 
ized  individual,  are  securely  seated  at  the  heart  of  reality 
and  control  the  process  of  things.  God  is  the  incarnation 
of  the  system  of  ideal  values.  Therefore  God  is  essentially 
the  perfect  social  self — the  supreme  self — who  lives  and 
fulfills  himself  in  and  through  the  regeneration  or  develop¬ 
ment  of  the  spiritual  man  in  and  through  the  ideal  society. 
God  is  the  ideal  embodiment  of  the  values  which  are  real¬ 
ized  by  the  moral  and  rational  self  as  a  member  of  a  social 
order  which  functions  to  serve  these  values.  Religion  af¬ 
firms  the  ideal  unity  and  ground  of  value  to  be  the  most 
real  being. 


556 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


The  business  of  the  philosophy  of  religion  is  to  deter¬ 
mine  what  religion  means  and  aims  at,  in  the  successive  and 
varied  phases  of  its  development  in  history  and  in  its  oper¬ 
ations  in  the  individual’s  experience  and  the  social  order. 
Religion  is  thus  both  social  and  individual,  both  historical 
and  personal,  and  the  philosophy  of  religion  should  evalu¬ 
ate  the  history  of  religion  or  interpret  the  movement  of 
religious  evolution,  the  religious  experience  of  the  indi¬ 
vidual,  and  the  religious  attitude  of  the  social  group.  From 
this  standpoint,  too,  it  should  determine  the  function  and 
meaning  of  the  God-idea,  of  salvation,  regeneration,  re¬ 
demption,  atonement,  the  freedom  and  vocation  of  man. 

In  short,  the  philosophy  of  religion  is  the  metaphysics  of 
selves,  society,  and  values,  applied  to  the  constructive  inter¬ 
pretation  of  the  religious  experience  of  the  race  in  the 
light  of  the  history  of  culture  and  psychology.  So  large  and 
deep  going  an  area  of  human  social  life  and  individual 
experience  as  religion  represents  must  be  taken  account 
of  by  the  philosopher ;  and,  if  he  cannot  find  room  for  it 
in  his  rubrics,  then  it  is  more  likely  that  his  rubrics  are  too 
small  and  rigid  than  that  the  whole  religious  history  of  the 
race  is  an  illusion. 


References 

Psychologies  by  Angell,  Stout,  Titchener,  Calkins,  Pillsbury, 
Kuelpe,  James  (Principles) ,  Wundt  ( Physiological  Psychol¬ 
ogy),  Watson,  Woodworth. 

Logic 

Introductory  Logics  by  Aikins,  Creighton,  Joseph. 

Bosanquet,  B.,  Essentials  of  Logic,  and  Logic  of  the  Morphology 
of  Knowledge. 

Mill,  J.  S.,  Logic. 

Russell,  Bertrand,  Principles  of  Mathematics. 

Windelband  and  Ruge,  Encyclopaedia  of  the  Philosophical 
Sciences,  Volume  I,  “Logic.” 


OTHER  PHILOSOPHICAL  DISCIPLINES  557 


^Esthetics 

Aristotle,  Poetics,  translated  by  Butcher. 

Carritt,  The  Theory  of  Beauty . 

Coleridge,  Biographia  Liter  aria ,  et  cetera. 

Croce,  B.,  2 Esthetics . 

Hegel,  Philosophy  of  Fine  Art,  “Introduction,”  translated  by 
Bosanquet. 

Kant,  I.,  Critique  of  Judgment. 

Langfeld,  H.  S.,  The  2 Esthetic  Attitude. 

Parker,  D.  H.,  2 Esthetics . 

Plato,  Republic,  Book  X,  and  Phcedrus. 

Ruskin,  J.,  Modern  Painters,  et  cetera. 

Santayana,  G.,  The  Sense  of  Beauty. 

Schopenhauer,  The  World  as  Will  and  Idea,  Book  3. 

Philosophy  of  Religion 

*  Ames,  E.  S.,  Psychology  of  Religious  Experience. 

Balfour,  A.  J.,  Theism  and  Humanism. 

Boutroux,  Science  and  Religion  in  Contemporary  Philosophy. 
Bowne,  B.  P.,  Theism. 

Caird,  E.,  The  Evolution  of  Religion. 

*  Coe,  G.  A.,  Psychology  of  Religion. 

Durkheim,  E.,  Elementary  Forms  of  the  Religious  Life. 
Galloway,  G.,  Philosophy  of  Religion. 

Hocking,  W.  E.,  The  Meaning  of  God  in  Human  Experience. 

*  Hoffding,  H.,  Philosophy  of  Religion. 

*  James,  Wm.,  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience. 

Leuba,  J.  H.,  A  Psychological  Study  of  Religion. 

*  Pratt,  J.  B.,  The  Religious  Consciousness. 

*  Pringle-Pattison,  A.  Seth,  The  Idea  of  God. 

Royce,  Josiah,  The  Problem  of  Christianity. 

Santayana,  G.,  Reason  in  Religion. 

Sorley,  W.  R.,  Moral  Values  and  the  Idea  of  God. 

*  Starbuck,  E.  D.,  Psychology  of  Religion. 

Ward,  J.,  The  Realm  of  Ends. 

Webb,  C.  C.  J.,  God  and  Personality,  and  Divine  Personality 
and  Human  Life. 

*  Wright,  W.  K.,  A  Studeyit’s  Philosophy  of  Religion. 


CHAPTER  XXXII 


PROGRESS  IN  PHILOSOPHY 

Some  persons  would  deny  that  philosophy  has  made  any 

substantial  advances  in  modern  times.  They  would  assert 

that  the  history  of  philosophy  reveals  only  a  succession  of 

» 

systems,  reflecting  the  respective  individualities  of  their 
makers  cross-fertilized  by  the  cultural  conditions  of  their 
times.  No  continuous  advance  is  made.  One  system  is 
not  built  upon  the  achievements  of  its  predecessors.  Phi¬ 
losophy  is  like  poetry,  only  much  more  dry,  cumbrous,  and 
obscure  in  statement.  It  is  primarily  the  expression  of  a 
temperament.  “A  man’s  philosophy  depends  on  the  kind 
of  man  he  is”  (Fichte).  Science,  on  the  other  hand,  moves 
forward  with  sure,  if  slow,  steps,  and  by  well-defined 
methods. 

There  is  some  truth  in  this  view,  but  it  is  superficial  and 
an  exaggeration.  Certainly  philosophy  shares  in  the  vicis¬ 
situdes  of  culture.  It  ripens  only  in  a  mature  culture. 
There  is  no  rectilinear  or  curvilinear  nor,  indeed,  any  other 
regular  form  of  progress  in  the  history  of  culture;  there¬ 
fore,  none  in  philosophy.  A  culture  develops  in  a  specific 
historical  situation,  spreads  and  ripens,  then  perhaps  under¬ 
goes  either  partial  decadence  or  a  critical  transformation, 
owing  to  a  complexity  of  causes,  economic,  political,  moral, 
and  intellectual  (I  do  not  mean,  of  course,  that  social  causes 
can  be  sharply  separated  off  from  one  another;  they  inter¬ 
lock).  After  an  epoch  of  apparent  dissolution  a  culture  is 
again  built  up.  While  the  movement  of  history  cannot 

be  strung  out  on  the  threads  of  the  Hegelian  dialectic,  there 

558 


PROGRESS  IN  PHILOSOPHY 


559 


is  a  dialectic  in  cultural  history.  There  are  ages  of  con¬ 
struction,  of  the  upbuilding  of  cultural  values  and  institu¬ 
tions,  succeeded  by  stationary  ages  of  conservatism.  These, 
in  turn,  are  succeeded  by  ages  of  criticism,  radical  inquiry, 
and  revolution ;  followed  by  oscillatory  struggles  between 
the  forces  of  reaction  and  of  reconstruction.  The  Greek 
enlightenment  was  followed  by  the  social  disintegration 
of  the  Greek  world.  Upon  this  succeeded  the  conservative 
Roman  Empire.  The  downfall  of  the  latter  was  followed 
by  a  period  of  chaos,  after  which  medieval  culture  was 
gradually  built  up  to  its  apogee  in  the  thirteenth  century. 
An  age  of  critical  inquiry  began  again  and,  in  the  fifteenth 
and  sixteenth  centuries,  there  emerged  a  new  type  of 
culture  which  continued  fairly  stable  until  the  French 
Revolution  and  the  more  important  Industrial  Revolution. 
No  sooner  had  the  latter  seemingly  reached  a  stabilized  con¬ 
dition  in  the  latter  years  of  the  nineteenth  century  than 
it  began  to  issue  in  the  social  and  political  crises  which 
culminated  in  the  great  war.  The  present  age  is  one  of 
transition  and  reconstruction,  following  upon  the  age  in 
which  the  great  scale,  mechanized  industrialism,  struggling 
with  the  movement  of  democracy  towards  universal  equal¬ 
ization  of  opportunity,  ended  in  the  terrific  cataclysm  which 
finishes  the  old  epoch  and  begins  the  new.  The  task  before 
the  world  to-day  is  the  control  of  industrialism,  to  make 
it  subservient  to  the  principles  of  democratic  humanism. 
Philosophy  has  its  corresponding  tasks.  In  order  that  we 
may  see  what  these  are  it  will  be  necessary  to  review  briefly 
some  of  the  salient  advances  in  philosophy.  Before  doing 
so  let  us  note  that  the  claim  that  the  special  sciences  advance 
continuously,  with  sure  and  orderly  steps,  cannot  be  allowed 
before  the  court  of  history.  Science  shares,  too,  in  the 
vicissitudes  of  culture.  And,  during  long  stretches  of  time, 
for  example,  from  the  fourth  to  the  thirteenth  centuries  of 
our  era  in  European  culture,  there  was  no  substantial  ad- 


560 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


vance  made  in  either  science  or  philosophy.  The  civiliza¬ 
tion  of  the  Arab  caliphates  was  relatively  barren  in  both 
fields. 

It  is  true  that  philosophy  reflects  the  individualities  of 
its  authors  more  than  does  mathematics,  or  physics,  or 
biology ;  although  here,  too,  the  history  of  science  shows 
how  the  individuality  of  an  investigator  influences  his 
work.  Consider,  for  example,  the  differences  in  the  con¬ 
tributions  of  Copernicus,  Tycho,  Brahe,  Kepler,  and  Galileo 
to  the  new  astronomy,  and  of  Darwin,  Huxley,  and  Spen¬ 
cer  to  the  doctrine  of  evolution.  But  the  individuality  of 
a  thinker  enters  more  fully  into  his  product  in  philosophy 
than  in  natural  science,  precisely  because  a  philosophy  is 
the  concentration  point  at  which  the  problems  and  inter¬ 
pretation  of  humanistic  values  and  naturalistic  facts  and 
theories  meet  and  must  be  synthesized  into  a  global  or  total 
view.  Since  the  personality  of  man  is  both  source  and  cen¬ 
ter  of  reference  for  both  naturalistic  and  humanistic  inter¬ 
ests,  the  results  of  their  conflicts  and  concordats  must 
reflect,  as  well  as  react  upon,  the  medium  in  which  they 
live  and  move  and  have  their  being — the  spiritual  individ¬ 
uality  of  man. 

The  course  of  Greek  philosophy  shows  progress  from 
the  naive  hylozoism  of  Thales  up  to  the  formulation  of  two 
classical  standpoints — the  Platonic-Aristotelian  idealism 
and  the  mechanistic  philosophy  of  atomism.  With  the 
political  decay  of  Greece  and  the  spread  and  dilution  of 
Greek  culture  in  the  Roman  Empire  there  was  progress 
in  ethics,  through  the  universalization,  by  the  Stoics,  of  the 
ethical  features  of  the  classical  idealism.  In  Plotinus, 
finally,  we  find  a  significant  religious  synthesis,  in  which 
a  speculative  and  ascetic  mysticism  is  based  on  the  classical 
idealism.  This  is  the  last  legacy  of  the  dying  Greek  spirit 
to  the  future.  Then  ancient  culture  disintegrates.  It  is 
almost  entirely  submerged  in  the  welter  of  social  chaos  and 


PROGRESS  IN  PHILOSOPHY 


561 


barbarism  called  the  Dark  Ages  (end  of  fifth  to  beginning 
of  ninth  century).  A  new  civilization  must  be  built  up — 
the  Romano-Germanic-Christian.  The  heritage  of  classical 
culture  is  slowly  recovered  and  utilized.  But,  not  until 
the  new  civilization  reaches  maturity  in  the  thirteenth  cen¬ 
tury  could  there  be  a  philosophical  renaissance.  Then 
appears  a  classical  achievement — the  christianized  Aris- 
totelianism  of  Thomas  Aquinas,  coincidental  with  the 
achievements  of  Gothic  Art  and  of  a  new  and  high  type  of 
civic  life.  At  the  same  time  the  stirring  of  the  new  spirit 
of  scientific  inquiry  is  marked  by  the  movement  of  philos¬ 
ophy  towards  independence  of  ecclesiastical  dogmas.  The 
growth  of  the  new  mechanical  system  of  the  universe,  in  the 
science  of  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries,  a  growth 
which  involved  the  higher  development  both  of  mathemat¬ 
ical  and  empirical  methods  of  inquiry,  is  coincidental  and 
interwoven  with  the  development  of  the  great  systems  of 
rationalism  and  empiricism.  Rationalism  is  worked  out 
with  rigor  and  vigor,  to  a  one-sided  conclusion,  in  the 
school  of  Leibnitz-Wolff.  At  the  same  time,  one-sided  em¬ 
piricism  is  worked  out,  with  even  greater  clarity  and  thor¬ 
oughness,  in  the  impressionism  or  atomistic  sensationalism 
of  Hume.  The  very  completeness  and  precision  with  which 
a  one-sided  standpoint,  such  as  that  of  Hume,  is  carried 
out,  is  a  necessary  condition  of  further  progress.  By  re¬ 
vealing  the  ultimate  skeptical  consequences  of  impression¬ 
ism,  Hume  became  the  forerunner  of  a  new  and  deeper 
speculative  philosophy.  Kant  is  the  bridge,  or  halfway 
house,  between  the  conflicting  rationalism  and  skeptical 
empiricism  of  the  eighteenth  century  and  the  new  specula¬ 
tive,  historical,  and  dynamic  idealism  of  Fichte  and  Hegel. 
Kant  did  not  achieve  the  synthesis  himself ;  but,  without 
him,  there  could  have  been  no  Fichte  or  Hegel.  We  may 
admit  in  turn  that  the  soaring  and  imperialistic  claims  of 
Fichte  and  Hegel  to  compass  the  whole  meaning  of  earth 


562 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


and  heaven  have  not  been  made  good,  and  are  now  dis¬ 
credited.  But  it  cannot  be  gainsaid,  by  a  competent  and 
open-minded  historian,  that  Fichte’s  dialectic  gave  the 
cue,  first  to  Schelling  and  then,  through  him,  to  Hegel ;  and 
that  Hegel,  in  turn,  by  his  analysis  of  the  movement  of 
mind  as  creator  and  bearer  of,  and  as  realizing  itself  in, 
the  whole  life  of  culture,  made  a  'permanent  contribution  to 
the  race’s  heritage  of  philosophical  insights.  Hegel’s  anal¬ 
ysis  of  the  development  of  selfhood,  and  of  the  meaning  and 
function  of  social  culture  as  an  objectification  of  mind  and 
the  condition  of  the  development  of  the  individual  mind, 
has  carried  on  the  work  of  Plato  to  a  higher  level  and  given 
us  a  lasting  gain  for  the  theory  of  mind  and  society. 

Hegel ’s  philosophy  was  an  idealistic  or  spiritualistic  evo¬ 
lutionism.  Reality  is  a  teleological  process.  It  is  the 
inevitable  movement  of  the  self-evolution  of  spirit.  The 
final  goal  of  this  process  is  the  coming  to  full  self-conscious¬ 
ness  of  the  Divine  Spirit,  through  the  historical  progress 
of  human  culture  in  the  life  of  the  state  and  in  art,  science, 
and  religion.  Philosophy  is  the  clear  comprehension  of 
the  meaning  of  the  whole  process.  Two  defects  Hegel’s 
philosophy  had — (1)  Its  arbitrary  construction  of  empiri¬ 
cal  data  in  the  field  of  history,  and,  still  more,  in  the  field 
of  natural  science:  (2)  It  tended  to  merge  the  individual 
personality  entirely  in  the  institutional  or  social  mind  and 
thus,  while  proclaiming  freedom  to  be  the  goal  of  prog¬ 
ress,  made  it  to  consist  in  the  complete  identity  of  the  per¬ 
sonal  spirit  with  the  social  and  impersonal  spirit  (the 
Zeitgeist),  culminating  in  the  Teutonic  state  and  the  Hegel¬ 
ian  philosophy.  Consequently  this  philosophy  fell  into 
disrepute,  both  with  those  imbued  with  the  temper  of 
empirical  and  naturalistic  science  and  with  those  enkindled 
with  the  spirit  of  the  new  democracy  as  the  instrument 
for  attaining  universal  freedom  and  individual  self-realiza¬ 
tion. 


PROGRESS  IN  PHILOSOPHY 


563 


The  establishment  of  the  doctrine  of  the  Conservation  of 
Energy,  a  succession  of  great  discoveries  in  physics,  espe¬ 
cially  in  electricity  and  magnetism  and  radioactive  trans¬ 
formations,  the  formulation  of  the  Periodic  Laic  in  chem¬ 
istry  and  the  great  developments  in  the  latter  science,  more 
especially  in  organic  chemistry,  the  rise  of  the  Darwinian 
theory  of  evolution,  the  extension  of  the  evolutionary  stand¬ 
point  in  the  fields  of  geology,  cosmogony,  psychology, 
sociology,  ethics,  and  religion,  and,  finally,  the  successful 
application  of  experimental  methods,  as  well  as  evolution¬ 
ary  modes  of  explanation,  in  physiology  and  psychology, 
have  given  new  impetus  to  materialism,  which,  in  the 
mechanistic  theory  of  life  and  mind,  society  and  culture, 
is  a  vigorous  movement  at  the  present  time.  The  new 
materialism  is  different  from  the  older  form,  in  that  it 
substitutes  for  the  mass  particles  of  the  older  theory  punc¬ 
tual  centers  of  energy.  The  course  of  things  is  determined 
by  the  blind  alterations  in  the  configurations  in  space  of 
these  energy  centers. 

At  the  same  time  the  influence,  on  men’s  world  views, 
of  the  historical  and  comparative  methods  employed  in  the 
humanistic  or  social  sciences  (to  which  Hegel  gave  a  pow¬ 
erful  impetus  by  his  interpretation  of  the  evolution  of 
human  culture)  has  tremendously  increased.  While  work¬ 
ers  in  these  fields  have  been  impressed  with  the  multiform 
and  confusing  array  of  facts  and  have,  consequently,  be¬ 
come  shy  of  sweeping  generalizations,  the  main  inspiring 
motive  of  this  work  is  the  idea  of  an  evolutionary  order  and 
meaning,  to  be  unravelled  by  patient  investigation.  Fuller 
knowledge  of  the  natural  order  will  find  practical  applica¬ 
tion  in  the  reconstruction  of  the  social  order,  by  supplying 
a  philosophy  of  culture  and  progress.  It  will  also  satisfy 
man’s  appetite  for  an  intellectual  chart  that  will  illumine 
the  tangled  facts  of  human  experience  and  give  a  better 
clue  to  the  meaning  of  human  history  and  the  significance 


564 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


of  the  human  lot  in  the  environing  cosmos — a  clue  better 
grounded  than  the  older  systems,  because  based  on  the 
richer  and  wider  insights  into  the  naturalistic  implications 
of  human  life  and  the  nature  of  man  and  society  which 
have  been  accumulating  since  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth 
century. 

One  man  has  attempted  the  task,  no  longer  possible  of 
achievement  by  one  man,  of  a  comprehensive  synthesis  of 
the  results  both  of  the  natural  and  humanistic  or  social 
sciences.  Since  Hegel  the  most  ambitious  attempt  at  a 
philosophical  synthesis  is  the  synthetic  philosophy  of  Her¬ 
bert  Spencer.  His  guiding  thread  is  the  concept  of  uni¬ 
versal  evolution.  While  Spencer  covers  the  whole  field  of 
thought  and  action,  including  sociology,  psychology  and 
ethics,  the  categories  of  physical  science  have  the  best  of 
it  in  his  system.  While  his  logic  is  often  faulty  and  his 
synthesis  too  vague  and  viewy,  the  courage,  persistence, 
and  sweep  of  outlook  with  which  Spencer  planned  and 
executed  his  herculean  task  are  admirable.  The  system  as 
a  whole  will  not  stand  before  critical  examination ;  never¬ 
theless  he  has  contributed  many  valuable  apergus  to  phi¬ 
losophy.  Examples  of  such  are — the  definition  of  evolution 
as  the  passage  from  a  state  of  indefinite,  incoherent  homo¬ 
geneity  to  a  state  of  definite,  coherent  heterogeneity,  by 
concomitant  processes  of  differentiation  and  integration ; 
and  the  working  out  of  the  conception  of  life  and  mind  as 
continuous  adaptation  of  internal  relations  to  external 
relations. 

The  only  other  recent  system  that  bears  comparison 
with  Spencer’s  or  Hegel’s  is  that  of  Wilhelm  Wundt 
(+1921),  who  shows  an  enormous  knowledge,  not  only  of 
contemporary  science  and  learning,  but,  as  well,  of  the 
history  of  philosophical  and  scientific  thought  (in  knowl¬ 
edge  of  the  history  of  thought  Spencer  was  notoriously 
deficient).  Wundt’s  system  is  one  of  spiritualistic  or  psy- 


PROGRESS  IN  PHILOSOPHY 


565 


chical  and  indeed,  voluntaristic  evolutionism.  Will  is  the 
reality  manifested  in  all  finite  existence,  and  there  is  a 
universal  and  absolute  will  which  includes  all  finite  wills. 
Wundt’s  principle  of  creative  synthesis,  namely,  that  in 
psychical  development  and  evolution,  the  results  of  a  new 
synthesis  are  more  than  the  sum  of,  or  rise  higher  than 
the  sum  of,  the  qualities  of  the  elements  which  enter  into 
it,  is  perhaps  his  most  significant  contribution  to  general 
philosophy.  Lester  F.  Ward,  the  American  sociologist, 
makes  much  use  of  this  principle. 

Bergson’s  doctrine  of  evolution  as  a  creative  and  psy¬ 
chical  process,  which  eventuates  in  ever  increasing  differ¬ 
entiation  and  multiplication  of  individual  psychical  cen¬ 
ters,  as  well  as  his  attempt  at  a  solution  of  the  mind-body 
problem  in  dynamic  terms  will  undoubtedly  have  to  be 
reckoned  with  in  the  philosophy  of  the  future. 

The  most  important  works  in  systematic  philosophy  by 
living  English  writers  are  those  of  Bernard  Bosanquet  and 
Samuel  Alexander.  A.  N.  Whitehead ’s  contributions  to  the 
philosophy  of  nature  are  likewise  very  important. 

The  time  is  ripe  for  a  new  philosophical  synthesis.  The 
time  is  past  when  such  a  synthesis  can  be  achieved  by  any 
one  man.  It  must  be  the  fruit  of  the  cooperation  of  many 
minds.  I  will  close,  by  indicating  briefly  the  standpoints 
which  seem  to  me  to  have  been  won  and  the  directions  in 
which  we  may  look  for  further  progress. 

1.  In  metaphysics:  With  respect  to  the  mind-body  or 
spirit-matter  problem,  we  have  definitely  left  dualism  and 
the  identity-theory  behind  us.  The  issue  lies  clear-cut 
between  materialism  and  the  theory  that  man  and  the 
world  are  an  organic  unity  or  interdependent  system  of 
levels  of  actuality  or  energies,  physical,  vital,  and  mental. 
With  respect  to  the  problems  of  space  and  iime  the  only 
tenable  position  is  realistic.  The  spatial  order  is  a  true 
aspect  of  reality.  The  concept  of  eternity  cannot  be  ad- 


566 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


mitted  in  the  sense  of  timelessness,  if  by  that  be  meant 
that  the  temporal  order  is  illusory.  The  actual  world  is  a 
temporal  order,  but,  since  it  is  an  order ,  there  may  be  a 
permanent  and  continuously  effective  system  or  complex  of 
meanings  and  laws.  It  follows  too,  I  hold,  that  causal 
activity  is  a  genuine  reality.  With  regard  to  teleology  and 
values  (a  teleological  view  is  a  doctrine  of  the  conservation 
and  augmentation  of  values  in  reality)  the  issue  lies  clearly 
defined  between  a  metaphysics  which  would  assert  the  final 
illusoriness  of  all  human  values  and  one  which  would 
find,  in  constructing  its  world  picture,  that  there  are  valid 
grounds  for  a  reasonable  faith  in  the  conservation  of  values, 
although  it  is  impossible  to  say  in  what  forms  and  how 
close  in  character  to  human  estimation  of  values  that  con¬ 
servation  may  take  place. 

With  regard  to  the  relation  of  the  individual  to  the! 
world  ivhole  the  latter  is  to  be  interpreted,  in  so  far  as  it 
is  a  unity,  as,  at  its  highest  level,  a  dynamic  and  social 
unity. 

With  regard  to  the  problem  of  the  self ,  the  study  of 
the  aberrations,  the  psychological  development,  and  the 
social  implications,  of  personality  are  shedding  much  new 
light  on  the  nature  of  selfhood  or  personality.  They  seem 
to  me  to  validate  the  view  that  the  concept  of  socialized  per¬ 
sonality  is  the  best  key  to  the  meaning  of  the  world  process ; 
and,  on  the  other  hand,  to  show  that  personality  is  the 
resultant  of  the  interaction  of  a  complex  of  factors,  phys¬ 
ical,  vital,  mental,  and  social.  Personality  is  the  highest 
product  of  the  world-order. 

2.  In  ethics  and  social  philosophy :  Since,  in  these  fields, 
we  are  concerned  primarily  with  the  doctrine  of  human 
values  and  of  the  social  instruments  for  their  realization, 
it  is  not  to  be  expected  that  we  should  have  made  great 
progress  beyond  the  deepest  ethical  and  social  insights  of 
the  past ;  that,  for  instance,  with  respect  to  the  true  values, 


PROGRESS  IN  PHILOSOPHY 


567 


aims,  and  satisfactions  of  a  rational  human  life,  we  should 
have  far  transcended  those  masters  of  humanism,  Plato, 
Aristotle,  and  in  special  regards,  the  New  Testament 
writers,  and  of  such  moderns  as  Kant  and  Butler.  Never¬ 
theless,  we  are  gaining,  as  a  result  of  more  thorough  psy¬ 
chological  and  sociological  analysis,  coupled  with  a  larger 
historical  outlook,  a  richer,  better  balanced,  and  more 
scientifically  grounded,  doctrine  of  human  values  and  of 
the  social  conditions  of  their  realization  in  the  new  eco¬ 
nomic  order  brought  to  pass  by  the  Industrial  Revolution. 
It  is,  indeed,  a  commonplace  that,  since  the  Greeks,  we 
have  gained  considerably  in  depth  of  insight  into  the  nature 
of,  and  the  common  right  to  the  enjoyment  of,  the  funda¬ 
mental  human  values.  The  immediate  problems  now  are, 
not  so  much  the  formulation  of  a  new  body  of  doctrine  as 
to  what  are  the  true  values  of  rational  living,  as  they  are 
the  application  of  the  insights  we  already  possess  to  the 
reorganization  of  social  institutions.  The  theory  of  educa¬ 
tion  and  of  the  whole  organized  activities  of  social  culture 
must  be  seen  in  their  right  perspectives,  with  reference  to 
the  basic  human  values.  We  need  badly  the  extension  and 
application  of  the  idealistic  philosophy  of  education,  cul¬ 
ture,  and  progress.  Our  practitioners,  in  education  and 
social  administration  are,  to  too  great  an  extent,  mere 
empirics  and  hand-to-mouth  politicians.  They  are  guided 
by  no  reasoned  convictions ;  they  have  no  philosophy  of  cul¬ 
ture  or  progress,  because  they  have  no  doctrines  of  social 
ends  and  values,  no  social  philosophy.  We  must  set  about, 
straightway,  to  determine  how  the  industrial  order  and 
the  administration  of  educational  and  other  social  institu¬ 
tions  must  be  reconstructed,  in  order  to  achieve  the  democ¬ 
ratization  of  man’s  opportunity  to  realize  and  enjoy  all 
the  basic  human  values,  without  cheapening  these  values 
or  hindering  the  creation  of  new  values.  The  humaniza¬ 
tion  of  industry  and  education  and  the  civilization  or  cul- 


568 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


tural  uplift  of  democracy  are  the  central  problems  of  social 
philosophy  in  the  neiv  day. 

3.  In  philosophy  of  religion  the  assiduous  cultivation 
of  psychological  methods  of  interpretation,  interwoven 
with  the  results  of  the  comparative  and  scientific  histor¬ 
ical  study  of  religions,  viewed  as  factors  in  the  history  of 
civilization  causally  influenced  by  the  other  factors,  eco¬ 
nomic,  legal,  political,  moral,  and  intellectual,  as  well  as 
influencing  these  other  factors,  are  bearing  fruit  in  a  syn¬ 
thetic  conception  of  the  place  of  religion  in  culture,  of  its 
evolution  and  its  meaning  for  society  and  the  individual. 
It  is  dawning  upon  cultivated  men  that  no  historical  form 
of  religion  can  be  altogether  false  and  none,  in  its  past 
forms,  the  final  and  absolute  truth.  In  fact  the  question 
of  absolute  and  final  truth  or  falsity  becomes  a  juvenile 
irrelevancy.  Since,  in  religion,  man  is  ever  seeking  and 
finding  for  his  own  time,  circumstances  and  individuality,  a 
response  to  the  postulate  of  the  supremacy  and  conserva¬ 
tion  of  the  psychic  and  spiritual  values  of  the  social  order 
and  the  individual  soul,  religion  must  evolve  with  the 
evolution  of  the  consciousness  of  values,  and  that  means 
with  man’0  entire  cultural  history.  For  a  religion  is  the 
idealization  uf  the  values  sought  and  held  by  a  social  group 
or  an  individual.  The  new  truth  that  is  becoming  clearer 
is  that,  while,  on  the  one  hand,  there  is  no  unchangeable 
form  of  natural  religion ,  on  the  other  hand,  every  impor¬ 
tant  form  of  religion  is  natural  to  man  in  the  given  stage 
of  human  culture.  The  evolution  of  spiritual  experience 
and  apprehension  cannot  advance  beyond  the  level  of  man’s 
cultural  development.  Even  the  creative  insights  of  seer 
and  prophet  are  conditioned  by  their  social  media. 

This  attitude  towards  religion  does  not  imply  that,  in 
times  past,  spiritual  insights  may  not  have  been  reached 
that  wfill  not  be  thrown  away  or  transcended  in  the  march 
of  civilization.  The  spiritual  evolution  of  man  is  a  process 


PROGRESS  IN  PHILOSOPHY 


569 


in  which,  as,  indeed,  to  a  less  striking  degree,  in  natural 
evolution,  in  critical  moments  of  time,  permanent  heights 
of  achievement  or  insight  have  been  reached.  If  Sopho¬ 
cles,  Plato,  the  Apollo  Belvedere,  the  Logic  of  Aristotle, 
Shakespeare,  Newton,  the  elementary  principles  of  mathe¬ 
matics  and  mechanics,  stand  for  cultural  goods  that  will 
never  be  transcended  in  their  own  order,  or  be  cast  away, 
it  is  quite  as  reasonable  to  suppose  that  the  messages  of 
Isaiah,  the  life  of  Jesus,  the  writings  of  St.  John,  will 
permanently  minister  to  the  spiritual  needs  of  man.  Surely 
this  is  all  the  finality  required  by  man.  For  genuine  prog¬ 
ress,  in  all  directions,  takes  place  by  incorporating,  apply¬ 
ing,  and  expanding  that  which  is  best  in  the  past. 

Thus,  to  the  caviller  at  philosophy  for  its  slow  and  cir¬ 
cuitous  progress  we  say — Retrospice  et  Circumspice!  Look 
to  what  has  been  won  in  the  whole  history  of  culture! 
Raise  your  eves  above  the  din  and  confusion  of  the  imme- 
diate  present,  in  which  you  are  immersed,  and  you  will 
find  that,  in  philosophy,  as  in  other  phases  of  human  cul¬ 
ture,  there  is  a  living  and  moving  present  which  ever  grows 
as  it  spans  the  generations,  because  it  honors  and  includes 
the  fruits  of  the  travails  of  man’s  spirit  in  the  past,  and 
only  thus  is  an  effective  ministrant  to,  and  herald  of,  a 
better  present  in  the  future.  Enlarge  the  bounds  of  your 
mental  vision  and  spiritual  comprehension,  by  a  sympa¬ 
thetic  appreciation  of  the  growth  of  the  spirit  in  history, 
and  you  will  get  encouragement  and  incitement  to  contrib¬ 
ute,  however  humbly,  to  the  intellectual  comprehension  and 
direction  of  the  progress  of  the  human  spirit  in  time ;  will 
be  guided  to  labor  effectively  for  that  enhancement  and 
spread  of  intellectual,  moral,  and  other  spiritual  values  in 
which  man  finds  his  true  immortality. 


570 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 

References 

These  are  selected  as  fairly  indicative  of  the  present  situation 
and  next  steps  in  philosophy. 

1.  In  Metaphysics 

Alexander,  Samuel,  Space ,  Time  and  Deity. 

Bosanquet,  B.,  The  Principle  of  Individuality  and  Value  and 
The  Value  and  Destiny  of  the  Individual. 

Hoernle,  R.  F.  Alfred,  Studies  in  Contemporary  Metaphysics. 
Leighton,  J.  A.,  Man  and  the  Cosmos. 

MacKenzie,  J.  S.,  Elements  of  Constructive  Philosophy. 
Marvin,  W.  T.,  A  First  Book  in  Metaphysics. 

Russell,  Bertrand,  Our  Knowledge  of  the  External  World. 
Sheldon,  W.  H.,  Strife  of  Systems. 

Spaulding,  E.  G.,  The  New  nationalism. 

Whitehead,  A.  N.,  The  Concept  of  Nature,  and  Principles  of 
Natural  Knowledge. 

2.  In  Ethics  and  Social  Philosophy 

Cole,  G.  D.  H.,  The  World  of  Labor. 

Dewey,  John,  Human  Nature  and  Conduct. 

Dewey  and  Tufts,  Ethics. 

Hobhouse,  L.  T.,  Justice. 

Hobson,  J.  A.,  Work  and  Wealth. 

Russell,  Bertrand,  Proposed  Roads  to  Freedom. 

Wallas,  G.,  The  Great  Society,  and  Our  Social  Heritage. 

3.  In  the  Philosophy  of  Education 

Bagley,  W.  C.,  Educational  Values. 

Dewey,  John,  Democracy  and  Education. 


EPILOGUE 


William  James  said  that  the  great  thing  about  a  philoso¬ 
pher  is  his  vision.  This  statement  we  may  accept  subject 
to  certain  qualifications.  Philosophy  culminates  in  visions 
— in  comprehensive  and  concentrated  insights  or  intuitions. 
These  intuitions  must  be  built  upon  a  wide  range  of  fact, 
and  penetrating  keenness  of  insight,  as  well  as  power  of 
synthesis. 

We  have  traveled  somewhat  hastily  through  the  field  of 
philosophy  and  have  examined  critically  its  main  problems 
and  the  chief  theories  offered  on  these  problems.  I  venture 
to  sum  up  what  seem  to  me  the  main  insights  that  we  have 
won  on  this  journey. 

The  universe  is  a  dynamic  and  living  whole,  a  super- 
organic  system,  which  achieves  its  highest  level  in  the  per¬ 
fecting  of  a  society  of  spirits.  It  contains  for  us  men,  finite 
and  fallible  as  we  are,  many  unreconciled  conflicts  and  not 
a  few  unsolved  problems.  The  ways  of  life  and  the  universe 
are  sufficiently  mysterious  to  keep  men  pondering  for  some 
time  to  come.  But  we  have  the  right  to  believe  that  life 
will  go  on  and  increase  in  beauty  and  meaning  and  move 
towards  perfection.  When  we  sit  down  in  a  calm  hour  we 
know  that  in  the  quest  for,  and  enjoyment  of,  responsible 
freedom,  rational  self-control,  justice,  love,  companionship, 
and  beauty,  are  the  highest  goods  for  man.  Life  and  history 
are  freighted  with  zest  for  those  who  can  feel  and  with 

meaning  for  those  who  can  see. 

571 


572 


THE  FIELD  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


The  world  is  the  field  for  the  fashioning  of  souls,  and  of 
civilizations,  as  instruments  for  the  growth  and  free  play  of 
souls.  Free  and  rational  individuality,  individuality  made 
free  through  unremitting,  clear-sighted  and  courageous 
thinking,  lived  out  in  friendly  companionship  with  the 
great  aspects  of  nature’s  life,  suffused  with  intelligent 
sympathy  for  the  beauty  and  grandeur  of  nature  and  sen¬ 
sible  of  its  healing  power,  and  with  an  equal  sympathy  for 
the  tragedies,  the  pathos,  the  heroisms,  joys  and  sorrows, 
defeats  and  victories  of  the  common  human  lot — this  is  the 
life  of  highest  good  for  man.  So  far,  then,  as  human 
knowledge  and  insight  can  carry  us  and  environed,  as  we 
must  admit  man  is,  by  forces  that  seem  blind  and  insensate, 
and  indifferent  alike  to  human  weal  and  human  woe,  we 
may  still  believe  that  our  universe  is  one  of  living  and 
spiritual  creativeness,  the  highest  level  of  being  that  we 
can  glimpse  a  society  of  selves  moving  on  towards  richer 
harmony  and  deeper  satisfactions,  through  the  joint  power 
of  reasoned  insight  and  sympathetic  feeling  interfused. 


INDEX 


Abelard,  176. 

Absolute,  The,  of  Bradley, 
268/.,  411/.;  of  Hegel, 

257#.,  264#.,  403#.,  427, 
491#.;  of  Spinoza,  400#.; 
the  self  and  the,  264  #.,  407, 
411#.,  426#.;  and  time, 

408  #.,  427  #. 

Absolute  Idealism,  251-270, 
403-413,  426-432. 

Academy,  Platonic,  85,  143. 

Acosmism,  401. 

Actuality,  in  Aristotle,  ISO- 
133,  138/. 

Adaptation,  383  #. 

^Esthetics,  30,  553  /. 

Alexander,  Samuel,  280,  283, 
295—302,  309. 

Amos,  the  Prophet,  486. 

Animatism,  37. 

Animism,  37,  444. 

Anaxagoras,  64  #. 

Anaximander,  57  #. 

Anaximenes,  57  #. 

Anselm,  154,  176. 

Apologists,  Christian,  167. 

Aquinas,  Thomas,  153,  177, 
179  /. 

Archimedes,  143,  247. 

Arian  heresy,  170. 

Aristarchus,  143. 

Aristophanes,  86. 

Aristotelianism,  177. 

Aristotle,  15,  76,  77,  126-141; 


actuality,  See'  Entelechy; 
criticism  of  Plato,  100,  130  /.; 
end,  131-133,  138;  entelechy, 
130-134,  139 ;  ethics  of, 

140/.;  final,  formal,  efficient, 
and  material  causes,  ISO- 
133  ;  form,  theory  of,  130- 
133,  138/.;  God,  conception 
of,  138/.;  good,  theory  of, 
140/.;  individual,  theory  of 
the,  130-133;  judgment,  the¬ 
ory  of,  134;  knowledge,  the¬ 
ory  of,  135-137 ;  logic,  126- 
130 ;  matter,  theory  of,  ISO- 

133,  138/.;  metaphysics  or 
theory  of  reality,  130-133, 
138  /.;  potentiality  or  possi¬ 
bility,  theory  of,  130-133, 

134,  137-139 ;  psychology, 

133- 135;  reason,  theory  of, 

134- 139,  141 ;  sense-percep¬ 
tion,  theory  of,  135-137; 
thought,  See  Reason;  univer- 
sals,  theory  of,  127-129, 
136/.,  188,  192,  193,  388, 
434,  478,  529,  532. 

Assumptions  in  science,  27-29, 
81,  540  /. 

Athanasius,  170/. 

Atomism,  ancient,  68-71,  145; 
modern,  213#.;  logical,  or 
pluralism,  291  /.,  413  #. 
Augustine,  Saint,  152,  155,  172, 
174,  435  n.,  488. 


574 


INDEX 


Aurelius,  Marcus,  145. 

Avenarius,  Richard,  197,  285. 

Axiology,  471,  544. 

Ba.,  38. 

Babylonian  myths,  47. 

Bacon,  Francis,  190  /. 

Bacon,  Roger,  178,  187,  190. 

Beginnings  of  philosophy  and 
science,  53-66. 

Behaviorism  in  psychology,  4, 
546  ff. 

Berkeley,  George,  98,  154,  187, 
196,  198,  205/.,  214,  224, 
242-247,  435,  479. 

Bergson,  Henri,  155,  196,  197 
n.,  198,  309-331,  382  /.,  388, 
432,  445,  565. 

Bernard,  Saint,  153. 

Biology  and  philosophy,  7  /., 
548. 

Body  and  mind,  275-278,  565. 
See  also  Dualism,  Idealism, 
Identity-Theory,  Material¬ 
ism,  Neutral  Monism. 

Boehme,  J.,  153. 

Boethius,  176. 

Bonaventura,  153. 

Bosanquet,  Bernard,  196,  197, 
225,  253,  267,  269,  300,  427, 
479,  565. 

Bossuet,  Bishop,  488. 

Bowne,  B.  P.,  419. 

Bradley,  F.  H.,  155,  196,  197, 
225,  253,  267,  268/.,  407, 
412,  479. 

Brahman,  152,  Brahma,  398. 

Brahe,  Tycho,  560. 

Browning,  R.  B.,  quoted,  .410. 

Bruno,  G.,  155,  187,  403. 

Bucke,  Dr.  R.  M.,  152. 


Buddha,  152,  162. 
Bunyan,  John,  152. 
Burckhardt,  J.  C.,  485. 
Buchner,  L.,  196. 
Butler,  Bishop,  16,  460. 
Byron,  Lord,  250. 


Caird,  E.,  225,  253. 

Calkins,  M.  W.,  300,  411. 

Cambridge  Platonists,  155. 

Carlyle,  Thos.,  423. 

Carneades,  78  /. 

Causation,  primitive  ideas  of, 
50-53 ;  problem  of,  515  /. 

Cause,  problem  of,  in  early 
Greek  philosophy,  57-66;  in 
atomism,  68-72. 

Chalcedon,  synod  of,  171. 

Change,  Bergson  on,  309-325, 
328-331;  Hegel  on,  261,  267, 
405,  409,  491-494 ;  Heraclitus 
on,  60/.,  72,  73;  James  on, 
331  /. 

Christ,  Jesus,  168,  461. 

Christianity,  Catholic,  2;  early, 
166-172;  moral  theory,  460, 
462. 

Chrysippus,  145. 

Civilization,  and  progress,  503- 
512;  meaning  of,  507  ff.; 
present  crisis  in,  1-13;  and 
philosophy,  13-21. 

Civilization,  Greek,  Mediter¬ 
ranean,  55. 

Cleanthes,  145. 

Clifford,  W.  K.,  462. 

Codrington,  Bishop,  36. 

Collectivism,  465  ff. 

Community,  the  Beloved, 
Royce’s,  399,  411. 

Communism  in  Plato,  108. 


INDEX 


Comte,  Auguste,  494  ff. 

Condorcet,  E.,  489. 

Conduct,  the  problem  of,  74  ff. 

Conscience,  theories  of,  460- 
464. 

Conservation  of  Energy,  206  ff. 

Contemplation  of  God,  141, 
162/.,  339  ff. 

Contemplative  or  Philosophic 
Life,  the,  14  ff. 

Concept,  theories  of  the,  94  ff., 
127  ff.,  147  f.,  183.  See  also 
Forms,  Nominalism,  Realism, 
Universals. 

Continuity  and  discreteness,  the 
problem  of,  391-433. 

Contradiction,  the  law  of,  517, 
520,  552. 

Contradictions,  in  knowing, 
61  ff.,  78  ff.;  Hegel’s  view 
of,  257  ff.  ' 

Copernicus,  192,  560. 

Cosmogonies,  Early,  Babylon¬ 
ian,  Chinese,  Greek,  Hebrew, 
45-48. 

Cosmology,  195,  544. 

Cosmos,  in  Plato,  121  ff. 

Crawley,  E.,  38  /.,  52. 

Creation,  primitive  theories  of, 
45 ff • 

Creative  synthesis,  principle  of, 
564. 

Creativity  of  mind,  385  ff. 

Creighton,  J.  E.,  300. 

Criteria  of  truth,  531-543. 

Critical  realism,  283,  526-530. 

Croce,  Benedetto,  496. 

Culture,  Greek,  2,  12;  Medieval, 
2,  12,  173-176;  Modern,  1  ff., 
173,  188  ff.;  Present,  2-13, 
363-367,  466  /.,  509-511,  559, 
563  /. 


575 

Cultural-psychological  forces  in 
history,  506  /. 

Cycles,  World,  theory  of,  64. 


Dante,  16. 

Darwin,  Chas.,  17,  372,  376  ff., 
560,  563. 

Democracy,  and  culture,  7  ff., 
12  ff.,  363-367,  509-511. 

Democritus,  68-71. 

Descartes,  149,  186,  188,  189, 
195,  203  ff.,  434,  448,  513, 
516,  532. 

Determination  as  negation,  403. 

Determinism,  339-342,  400  /., 
413,  426  /.,  449-451. 

Development,  Aristotle’s  theory 
of,  130-139. 

Dewey,  John,  283,  309,  343-368, 
532,  537. 

Dilthey,  W.,  496. 

Dionysius,  the  Areopagite,  154. 

Ditheletism,  171. 

Docetic  heresy,  170. 

Double  aspect  theory.  See 
Identity  theory. 

Driesch,  Hans,  382,  445. 

Dualism,  196,  201-211.  See 
also  Kant. 

Duns  Scotus,  178,  181  /. 

Diirkheim,  E.,  395. 

Duty,  Kant’s  conception  of, 
236  /;  Stoics  on,  148. 

Economic,  forces  in  history, 
505 ;  collectivism  and  indi¬ 
vidualism,  465  ff. 

Education,  7  ff.;  and  philoso¬ 
phy,  13  ff.;  35/.,  356-368, 
566  /. 


576 


INDEX 


Ego.  See  Individuality,  Monad, 
Personality,  Self. 

Eleatics,  61  ff. 

Einstein,  A.,  521. 

Elements,  the  four,  64;  Anaxa¬ 
goras  on,  64. 

Emanation,  in  Plotinus,  158, 
160  /. 

Emerson,  R.  W.,  153,  155,  398. 

Empedocles,  64,  72,  73. 

Empiricism,  514-516 ;  radical, 
285  j ff.,  522  f.;  rational,  519, 
539-543 ;  sensationalistic, 
519  ff. 

Energy,  conservation  of.  See 
Conservation  of  energy. 

Enlightenment,  the  Greek,  74- 
83. 

Entelechy,  of  Aristotle,  130- 
134,  139;  of  Driesch,  382. 

Epictetus,  145. 

Epicureanism,  2,  145. 

Epistemology,  its  problems, 
513-530,  531-543,  544.  See 
also  Knowledge,  theory  of. 

Equality,  9  ff. 

Erigena,  John  Scotus.  See 
John,  the  Scot. 

Error,  problem  of,  61  ff.,  76  /., 
115,  288,  307,  524  ff. 

Eternal,  the,  and  the  temporal, 
332-342. 

Ethics,  nature  of,  456  ff. 

Euclid’s  Geometry,  143. 

Eugenics,  in  Plato,  110. 

Evil,  problem  of,  387  ff. 

Evolution,  definition  of,  372  ff; 
evidence  for,  375  /.;  mechan¬ 
ical  and  teleological  aspects 
of,  380-389;  methods  of,  376- 
380 ;  problem  of,  371-390 ; 


in  Bergson’s  philosophy,  316- 
321,  328-330. 

Experience,  the  Absolute  as, 
268/.,  411/. 

Experientialism,  organic,  277  ff. 
Ezekiel,  486. 


Fallacies,  of  observation,  50- 
53. 

Fechner,  G.  T.,  272. 

Fichte,  J.  G.,  155,  196, 198,  200, 
225,  239,  253-256,  300,  411, 
435,  448,  479,  491,  561,  562. 

Final  cause,  in  Aristotle,  130- 
133,  138/.;  in  medieval  and 
modern  thought,  192/.  See 
also  Teleology. 

Finality.  See  Teleology. 

Form,  in  Aristotle,  130-133, 
138/.;  in  Plato,  98-105. 

Fouillee,  Alfred,  309. 

Fox,  George,  152,  153. 

Freedom,  17,  339-342,  400/., 
413,  426  /.,  448-454. 

Freud,  S.,  438. 

Freudian  psychology,  4. 

Galileo,  192,  248,  560. 

Gassendi,  68. 

Genesis,  book  of,  47. 

Gnostics,  421,  488. 

God,  the  idea  of,  333-342, 
555/.;  in  Aristotle,  130, 
138/.;  in  Bergson,  322, 
330/.;  in  Berkeley,  244, 
246/.;  in  Bradley,  268/.; 
in  Christianity,  167  ff.,  334  ff., 
395;  in  Hebrew  religion,  167, 
334,  486 ;  in  Hegel,  261- 
265/.  403-407;  in  James, 


INDEX 


577 


331  /.,  420 ;  in  Leibnitz,  248 ; 
in  personalism,  418-425;  in 
Plato,  104/.,  119,  122/.,  124; 
in  Plotinus,  157-161 ;  in  plu¬ 
ralism,  418-425 ;  in  Royce, 
269,  398/.,  407,  411;  in 
Spinoza,  400-403,  408-411 ; 
in  Stoicism,  146;  in  tem- 
poralism,  330  /.,  332-342; 
meaning  of,  425  ff.,  477-484. 

Goethe,  16,  17,  490. 

Good,  the  idea  of,  in  Aristotle, 
140  /.;  in  Christianity,  167  /.; 
in  Democritus,  71 ;  in  Hegel, 
405  ff.,  491  ff.;  in  Kant,  236; 
in  Plato,  106-111;  in  Plo¬ 
tinus,  161-164;  in  Socrates, 
89-92 ;  in  Spinoza,  400  /., 
411 ;  in  Stoicism,  148  /. 

Problem  of,  456  ff.,  470- 
484,  496-512.  See  also  Val¬ 
ues. 

Gorgias,  76. 

Gospel,  Christian,  166  ff. 

Graeco-Roman  culture,  55. 

Great  men,  as  historical  forces, 
506. 

Greek  culture,  2,  12,  56  ff., 
142  /. 

Greek  philosophy,  57-164,  560. 

Green,  T.  H.,  196,  225,  253. 

Gumplowicz,  L.,  495. 

Haeckel,  Ernst,  196. 

Haldane,  J.  S.,  382,  445. 

Hamilton,  Sir  William,  225. 

Harmony  and  Discord,  as  cos¬ 
mic  forces,  61. 

Hate  and  Love,  as  cosmic 
forces,  64. 


Hedonism,  456. 

Hegel,  G.  W.  F.,  16, 17,  61,  155, 
196,  197,  198,  200,  225,  239, 
256-270,  300,  309,  375,  398, 
403-407,  409,  427,  435,  448, 
479,  491-494,  516,  532,  562  /. 

Helmholtz,  H.,  17. 

Heraclitus,  60/.,  72,  73,  76, 
309,  372. 

Herder,  372,  490. 

Hersehel,  William,  190/. 

Hesiod,  48. 

Heymans,  G.,  272. 

History,  logic  of,  496/.;  meta¬ 
physics  of,  497;  philosophy 
of,  485-512 ;  problems  of, 
496-503. 

Hobbes,  Thos.,  68,  196,  375, 
488.  ' 

Hocking,  W.  E.,  407. 

Holbach,  196. 

Holt,  E.  B.,  287  ff. 

Holy  Spirit,  doctrine  of,  169, 
171. 

Homer,  47  /. 

Howison,  G.  H.,  419. 

Hiigel,  F.  von,  154,  155. 

Hume,  David,  189,  190  /.,  200, 
217,  225,  240,  435/.,  489, 
515/.,  520,  522,  532,  561. 

Huxley,  T.  H.,  78,  372,  376,  560. 

Huyghens,  248. 

Hylozoism,  37,  58,  59. 


Idea-forces,  in  history,  505  /. 
Idealism,  196;  forms  of,  242- 
270;  Berkeleyan,  242-247; 
Hegelian,  256-270;  Leib- 
nitzian,  247-251 ;  objective, 
or  absolute,  251-270;  tele- 


578 


INDEX 


ological,  276 ff.,  282/.,  385 ff., 
425  ff.,  477-484,  529. 

Ideas,  in  Locke  and  Berkeley, 
98;  in  Plato,  98-105.  See 
also  Concepts,  Forms,  Uni- 
versals. 

Identity  theory,  196/.,  272-275. 

Immanence,  of  formative  prin¬ 
ciples,  131  ff.;  of  God,  146  ff., 
401,  424  /.  See  also  Singu- 
larism  and  Pluralism. 

Immortality,  in  Plato,  118; 
and  Values,  501-503. 

Incarnation,  in  Christian  doc¬ 
trine,  169  ff.;  in  Plotinus, 
158. 

Individual,  the.  See  Individ¬ 
uality,  Monad,  Personality, 
and  Self. 

Individualism,  183  /.,  197  /., 

392/.,  465  ff. 

Individuality,  14#.;  problem 
of,  181  ff.,  441  ff  446  /. 

Industrial  Revolution,  2  ff. 

Infinite,  problem  of,  62  /., 
234/.,  257  ff.,  337  f.,  400#. 

Inge,  W.  R.,  154,  155  n. 

Instrumentalism,  283,  343-368; 
critique  of,  359-368. 

Intelligence,  Bergson’s  theory 
of,  310,  317/.,  320#.;  cri¬ 
tique  of,  325-328.  See  also 
Instrumentalism. 

Intuition.  See  Bergson. 

Intuitionism  in  ethics,  460-463. 

Ionians,  57-66. 

Irenaeus,  487. 

Irrationalism,  4#. 

Isaiah,  395,  486. 

James,  William,  189,  197,  198, 


225,  285-287,  309,  331  /., 
334,  343,  345,  396,  420,  436, 
479,  515  /.,  532-537,  546,  571. 
Jehovah,  as  ruler  of  history, 
486  /. 

Jeremiah,  486. 

Jesus,  152.  See  Christ. 

John,  the  Scot,  154,  176. 

Jonah,  486. 

Jones,  R.  M.,  155  n. 

Jung,  C.  G.,  438. 

Justice,  467,  508. 

J ustin,  Martyr,  167,  487. 


Ka,  38. 

Kant,  I.,  16,  189,  196,  200,  204, 
205,  224-240,  259,  264,  435, 
443,  445-448,  460/.,  479, 
490,  515/.,  522,  532,  553, 
561. 

Theory  of  Ethics,  235  ff. 

Theory  of  Knowledge,  225- 
235. 

Theory  of  Ultimate  Real¬ 
ity,  235-239. 

Keats,  J.,  440. 

Kepler,  192,  560. 

Kipling,  R.,  461. 

Knowledge,  problem  of,  74#., 
513-543 ;  Aristotle’s  theory 
of,  125-137 ;  Bergson’s  theory 
of,  317  /.,  321-328 ;  Berke¬ 
ley’s  theory  of,  242-247; 
Dewey’s  theory  of,  343-348, 
359#.;  Hegel’s  theory  of, 
256-261;  Hume  on,  514#.; 
Kant’s  theory  of,  225-235 ; 
Locke  on,  514#.;  Plato’s  the¬ 
ory  of,  93-98;  Plotinus’  the¬ 
ory  of,  160;  Realistic  theory 
of,  280-283,  300-307;  Spi- 


INDEX 


noza  on,  400  ff.;  the  Stoic 
theory  of,  147  /. 

and  reality,  523-530;  cri¬ 
teria  of,  531-543. 

See  Epistemology,  Empiri¬ 
cism,  Experientialism,  Ideal¬ 
ism,  Pragmatism,  Realism, 
Truth. 


“Laissez  Faire 392. 

Lamarck,  372,  376  ff. 

La  Mettrie,  196. 

Law,  natural,  60  /.;  Roman, 
148  /. 

Lecky,  W.  E.  H.,  485. 

Leibnitz,  G.  W.,  16,  149,  187, 
189,  196,  198,  247-251,  411, 
416,  478,  488,  516,  561. 

Leonardo  da  Vinci,  16. 

Lessing,  G.  E.,  490. 

Leucippus,  68. 

Levy-Bruhl,  395. 

Liberty,  508  /. 

Liebmann,  O.,  250. 

Locke,  John,  187,  189,  190,  196, 
198,  200,  203  ff.,  214,  216/., 
240,  375,  448,  489,  513,  524, 
532. 

Logic,  Aristotle’s,  126-130 ;  in¬ 
ductive,  190  /.;  problems  of, 
548-553.  See  also  Knowl¬ 
edge,  theory  of,  and  Episte¬ 
mology. 

Logos,  Christian,  doctrine  of, 
105,  169-172;  of  Heraclitus, 
61;  of  Philo,  166. 

Lotze,  R.  H.,  196,  207. 

Loyola,  Ignatius,  154. 

Lucretius,  68. 

Luther,  154. 

Lyceum,  143. 


579 

Mach,  Ernst,  197,  225,  436, 
524. 

MacKenzie,  J.  S.,  300. 

Magic,  41-44;  and  science,  41/; 
and  religion,  41  /.,  44,  50 ; 
black  and  white,  44 ;  kinds 
of,  42  /. 

Man,  the  measure  of  things,  76. 

Mana,  36  ff. 

Manicheans,  488. 

Manitou,  36. 

Marett,  R.  R.,  37. 

Marx,  Karl,  494. 

Materialism,  ancient,  68-73; 
modern,  196,  212-223,  446. 

Mathematics,  pure,  520  /. 

Matter,  Aristotle  on,  130  ff., 
138;  Berkeley  on,  243-245; 
modern  conception  of,  208- 
211,  212-217;  Plato  on,  99  ff.; 
Plotinus  on,  157-161;  Stoics 
on,  146.  See  also  Conserva¬ 
tion  of  Energy. 

McDougall,  William,  196,  445. 

McTaggart,  J.  M.  E.,  420. 

Mechanism.  See  Materialism 
and  Matter. 

Medieval  philosophy.  See  Mid¬ 
dle  Ages. 

Meister  Eckhart,  153. 

Melanesians,  36 

Mentalism,  300. 

Metaphysics,  problems  of,  195- 
200,  *  371,  391  ff.,  434  ff.; 

present  situation  in,  565  /. 
See  also  Philosophy. 

Micah,  486. 

Michelangelo,  16. 

Middle  Ages,  culture  and  phi¬ 
losophy  of,  2,  12,  173-184, 
561. 

Miletus,  school  of,  57  ff. 


580 


INDEX 


Mill,  J.  S.,  190  /.,  479,  513. 

Mind,  and  body,  275-279.  See 
also  below  and  Dualism, 
Idealism,  Identity  theory, 
Materialism,  and  Neutral 
Monism. 

Mind  and  matter  in  modern 
philosophy,  201-223,  241- 

279. 

Modalists,  171. 

Modern  philosophy,  progress 
of,  561-565. 

Monad,  247-251,  275  ff. 

Monadology,  Leibnitzian,  247- 
251,  277. 

Monism,  epistemological,  in 
Aristotle,  135  /. 

Monism,  neutral,  197,  283-289, 
292. 

Monophysite,  heresy,  171. 

Monothelitism,  171. 

Moses,  167. 

Motion,  Zeno  on  paradox  of, 
62  /. 

Mysteries,  Orphic,  155. 

Mystic  way,  153,  161-163. 

Mysticism,  151-164.  See  also 
Bradley,  Bergson,  Hegel, 
Royce,  Spinoza. 

Myth,  types  of,  46;  Babylon¬ 
ian,  47;  Chinese,  46;  Greek, 
47/.;  Hebrew,  47;  Persian, 
46  /. 

Mythology,  45-48. 

Nature,  philosophy  of,  problems 
of,  199.  See  also  Cosmology, 
Evolution,  and  Metaphysics. 

Natures  in  Christ,  the  two, 

170/. 


Necessitarianism.  See  Deter¬ 
minism,  and  Singularism. 

Negation.  See  Hegel. 

Neoplatonism,  156-164;  its 
failure,  164. 

Neopythagoreanism,  155  /. 

Neutral  Monism,  197,  283-289. 

New  Realism,  280-308. 

Newton,  I.,  17,  192,  240. 

Nicaea,  Council  of,  171. 

Nicolas  of  Cusa,  154. 

Nietzsche,  Fr.,  309. 

Nominalism,  178-184.  See  also 
Universals. 

Notions,  general.  See  Univer¬ 
sals. 

Nous,  in  Anaxagoras,  66;  in 
Aristotle,  134;  in  Plato,  105; 
in  Plotinus,  158,  160. 

Novalis,  15,  153. 


Occam,  William  of,  178,  182  /. 

One,  the,  and  All.  See  Singu¬ 
larism,  and  Pluralism. 

Ontology,  195. 

Origen,  153,  170. 

Opportunity,  and  moral  prog¬ 
ress,  9  ff.,  509  ff. 

Opposites,  unity  of.  See 

Hegel. 

Orenda,  36. 

Organizing  principle  in  life, 
384  ff.;  in  the  self,  442  ff. 

Orphic,  cosmogony,  47  /.;  mjTs- 
teries,  155/. 

Othering,  process  of.  See 

Hegel. 

Panastius,  145. 

Panpsychism,  37. 


INDEX 


581 


Pantheism,  Stoic,  145-150;  de¬ 
fined,  146.  See  also  Singu- 
larism,  and  especially  Spi¬ 
noza. 

Parallelism,  psychophysical, 
272-275,  446. 

Parmenides,  61  /. 

Parousia,  488. 

Patripassionism,  171. 

Patten,  William,  382. 

Paul,  Saint,  149,  445,  487. 

Paulsen,  Friedrich,  272. 

Pawlow,  382. 

Pearson,  K.,  225,  436,  524. 

Perception,  Aristotle  on,  135- 
137;  Plato  on,  93  ff.;  Pro¬ 
tagoras  on,  76;  Stoics  on, 
147.  See  also  Knowledge, 
theory  of. 

Perry,  R.  B.,  280,  287  ff.,  303. 

Personality,  171  /.,  411  ff., 

416  ff.,  434-454;  disorders  of, 
438/.;  the  unconscious  in, 
437-439,  448;  theories  of, 
444—448.  See  also  Individual 
Monad,  and  Self. 

Personal  Idealism,  416  ff. 

Personalism,  pluralistic,  416- 
425. 

Phenomenalism,  524  ff. 

Philo  Judaeus,  156,  166. 

Philosophy,  and  the  cultural 
life,  1-21 ;  and  education, 
13  ff.;  and  poetry,  33;  and 
psychology,  545  ff.;  and  prac¬ 
tical  life,  29  ff;  and  religion, 
30  ff.;  and  science,  26-29; 
defined,  15  ff.,  25  ff.;  early 
Christian,  166-172 ;  main 
problems  of,'  32,  195-200; 
medieval,  173-184 ;  modern, 
its  spirit,  187-194;  progress 


in,  558-570;  rise  to  indepen¬ 
dence,  50-67 ;  social,  464- 
469,  567/. 

Plato,  16,  25,  33,  75,  76,  77,  84, 
85,  93-125,  193,  300,  429, 
432,  435,  440,  445,  478; 
arguments  of  certain  dia¬ 
logues  of  Plato,  112-125; 
doctrine  of  the  soul  (Psy¬ 
chology),  105/.;  hints  to 
the  study  of  Socrates-Plato, 
111-124;  of  Human  Good 
(Ethics  and  Social  Philos¬ 
ophy),  106-111;  theory  of 
education,  108-111 ;  theory 
of  Ideas  or  Reality  (Meta¬ 
physics),  98-105;  theory  of 
Truth  and  Knowledge,  OS- 
OS. 

Platonism,  155. 

Plotinus,  153,  157-164,  478. 

Pluralism,  391  ff.;  logical  atom¬ 
ism  as,  413-416 ;  personal- 
istic,  416-425. 

Plurality,  problem  of.  See 
Singularism  and  Pluralism, 
and  Substance. 

Plutarch,  155. 

Pneuma,  146. 

Poetry  and  Philosophy,  33. 

Politics  and  Ethics.  See  Social 
Philosophy. 

Possibility  of  experience,  exter¬ 
nal  world  as,  208  ff. 

Post  hoc  ergo  propter  hoc ,  51- 
53. 

Postulates,  of  knowledge,  517- 
519,  539-543. 

Potentiality,  in  Aristotle,  130- 
133,  134^  137-139. 

Pragmatism,  532-539.  See  also 
Instrumentalism. 


582 


INDEX 


Priestley,  Joseph,  196. 

Primitive  world  view,  35-49. 

Prince,  M.,  438. 

Pringle-Pattison,  A.  Seth,  300, 
418-419. 

Probability,  degrees  of,  as  the¬ 
ory  of  truth,  79. 

Progress,  144  /.;  causes  and  cri¬ 
teria  of,  503-512;  in  philos¬ 
ophy,  558-570;  problem  of, 
497-502. 

Protagoras,  76. 

Psyche,  in  Plotinus,  158. 

Psychology,  and  philosophy, 

i.95  /. 

Psychophysical  parallelism, 
272-275,  446. 

Purification,  in  Neoplatonic 
system,  162. 

Purpose,  and  mechanism.  See 
Evolution  and  Teleology. 

Pyrrho,  78. 

Pyrrlionic  scepticism,  79. 

Pythagoras,  155. 

Pythagorean,  brotherhood,  155. 

Quadrivium,  176. 

Qualities,  primary  and  second¬ 
ary,  69  j ff.,  81,  204,  209  ff., 
213#.,  306/.,  528. 

Quality,  and  quantity,  69-71. 

Ranke,  L.,  485. 

Rashdall,  H.,  419. 

Rational  empiricism,  519,  539- 
543. 

Rationalism,  in  Epistemology, 
516-523,  539  ff.;  in  Ethics, 
456. 

Ratzenhofer,  495. 

Realism,  critical,  283,  526-530; 


medieval,  178-184;  naive, 
523  ff.;  recent,  280-308;  cri¬ 
tique  of,  306-307. 

Realists,  extreme,  179  /. 

Reality,  problem  of,  195-200. 

Reason,  and  life,  16-21;  Stoic 
theory  of,  148. 

Reflective  life,  the,  16-21. 

Reformation,  the,  189  /. 

Relations,  95  ff.,  122  /.,  227  ff., 
258  ff.,  268,  280-307,  391  ff., 
413#.,  429#.,  519#.,  541/. 

Relativism,  agnostic,  475-477. 

Relativity  of  Knowledge,  75  ff, 
81/.,  343#.,  524#.,  533#. 

Religion,  nature  of,  30  ff.,  332— 
342,  482-484,  502  /.,  555  /. 

Reminiscence,  Plato  on,  94  /., 
117/. 

Renaissance,  the,  188  ff. 

Revolution,  the  French,  189. 

Ribot,  Th.,  395. 

Rickert,  H.,  481,  496. 

Roman  Empire,  1,  2 ;  culture  of, 
142-144. 

Roscellinus,  180. 

Rousseau,  J.  J.,  240,  375. 

Royce,  J.,  155,  196,  197,  225, 
253,  267,  269,  300,  309,  398  /., 
407,  411,  427,  428,  480,  537. 

Ruskin,  J.,  554. 

Russell,  B.,  197,  283,  289-295, 
414. 


Sabellians,  171. 

Saint  John,  17. 

Saint  Paul,  17,  45,  149. 
Salvation,  170. 

Sarx,  in  Plotinus,  158. 
Schelling,  F.  W.  J.,  154,  197, 
239,  272. 


INDEX 


583 


Schiller,  Friedrich,  490. 

Schiller,  F.  C.  S.,  420. 

Schleiermacher,  F.  E.  D.,  239. 

Scholasticism,  173-184. 

Schopenhauer,  F.,  196,  225, 
448. 

Science  and  philosophy,  26-29. 

Scotus,  Duns.  See  Duns  Scotus. 

Selection,  natural.  See  Evolu¬ 
tion. 

Self,  the,  434-454;  as  organiz¬ 
ing  principle,  442  /.;  disor¬ 
ders  of,  438/.;  doctrines  of, 
434-448;  freedom  and,  448- 
454 ;  will  and  intellect  in, 
447  /.;  subconscious,  437-439, 
448. 

Self-determination,  451-454. 

Self-realization,  in  ethics,  456. 

Seneca,  145. 

Shaftesbury,  Lord,  240. 

Shakespeare,  17. 

Shelley,  P.  B.,  155,  250 ;  quoted, 
391,'  554. 

Sidis  and  Goodheart,  438. 

Simmel,  G.,  496. 

Singularism  and  Pluralism, 
197#.,  391-433. 

Skepticism,  78-83. 

Social  Idealism  outlined,  431. 

Social  Philosophy,  199,  464- 
469,  503,  512,  5 66  /. 

Socrates,  75,  77,  84-92,  373. 

Sophists,  74-83,  85. 

Sophocles,  16. 

Sorley,  W.  R.,  418. 

Soul,  primitive  idea  of  the,  37- 
39. 

Space,  69,  392,  395  /.,  428. 

Spaulding,  E.  G.,  280,  303. 

Spencer,  H.,  197,  225,  309, 
372/.,  495,  525,  546,  564. 


Spinoza,  16,  17,  149,  187,  197, 
272,  394,  398-403,  408,  411, 
448,  478,  488. 

Spirit,  158,  169  #.  See  also 
God,  Individual,  Mind,  Per¬ 
sonality,  Self. 

Spiritualism,  446.  See  also 
Idealism. 

State,  philosophy  of,  183, 
197  #.,  392  /. 

Stoic  pantheism,  145-150;  phi¬ 
losophy,  2,  81,  145-150,  188. 

Strong,  C.  A.,  272. 

Subconscious,  437-439,  448. 

Substance,  in  early  Greek  phi¬ 
losophy,  57-73;  problem  of, 
195  #. 

Supernaturalism,  475. 


Tabu,  40. 

Taine,  H.  A.,  485. 

Talleyrand,  164. 

Tauler,  John,  152. 

Teleological  Idealism,  477-484; 
Teleological  Ethics,  463  /. 

Teleology,  of  Aristotle,  130  ff., 
138/.;  of  Bergson,  316-321, 
328-331;  of  Hegel,  262#., 
405  /.,  409 ;  of  Kant,  238 ; 
of  Leibnitz,  247-249 ;  of 
Plato,  100-104;  problem  of, 
193,  378-389.  See  also  His¬ 
tory,  Philosophy  of,  Prog¬ 
ress,  and  Values. 

Temporal,  the,  and  the  Eternal, 
332-342. 

Temporalism,  309-332. 

Tennyson,  Alfred,  155;  quoted, 
396,  397. 

Tertullian,  487. 

Thales,  57#.,  72,  73. 


584 


INDEX 


Theism.  See  God. 

Thomson,  J.  A.,  382,  445. 

Thoreau,  H.  D.,  554. 

Thought,  laws  of,  517-519. 

Time,  408#.,  425#.,  480#. 
See  also  Temporalism. 

Totemism,  40. 

Traherne,  Thomas,  165. 

Triadism,  theory  of  self,  445. 

Trinity,  doctrine  of  the,  168- 
172. 

Trivium,  176. 

Troeltsch,  Ernst,  496. 

Truth,  copy  theory  of,  531  /.; 
criteria  of,  531-543;  princi¬ 
ples  of,  541  /.;  pragmatic 
theory  of,  532-539.  See  also 
Epistemology,  and  Knowl¬ 
edge,  Theory  of. 

Turgot,  J.  B.,  489. 


Unconscious,  in  the  self,  437- 
439,  448. 

Understanding,  in  Kant,  277  #. 
Underhill,  Miss  Ev.,  154. 

TJnio  mystica ,  152,  162  #. 
Unity.  See  Singularism. 
Universals,  in  Aristotle,  127  #., 
136/.;  in  Plato,  93-105;  in 
Scholastic  philosophy,  178- 
184;  place  of,  392#.,  519- 
523,  550#. 

Upanishads,  397. 

Uranus,  planet,  521. 


Values,  aesthetic,  553-555;  fun¬ 
damental,  30,  387  #.;  and 
history,  496/.;  instrumental 
and  intrinsic,  471  #.;  moral, 


456#.;  religion  and,  473/., 
556 ;  theories  of  status  of, 
470-484;  types  of,  471 /. 
Vaughan,  Henry,  153. 

Vitalism,  382#. 

Vital  impetus,  316-331.  See 
Bergson. 

Voltaire,  411. 

Voluntarism,  447  /. 

Von  Huegel,  F.  See  Hiigel, 
F.  von. 


Wakanda,  36. 

Wallace,  A.  R.,  372. 

Ward,  James,  342,  418. 

Ward,  Lester  F.,  496. 

Warren,  H.  C.,  284. 

Watson,  J.  B.,  284. 

Wells,  H.  G.,  420. 

Whewell,  William,  190/. 
Whitman,  Walt,  152,  155;  quo¬ 
ted,  439,  554. 

Will,  primacy  of,  or  intellect, 
182,  447  /. 

Wilson,  President,  207. 
Windelband,  W.,  481,  496. 
Wolff,  Ch.,  225. 

Wordsworth,  155,  250;  quoted, 
397,  554. 

Wundt,  W.,  495  /.,  564  /. 


Xenophanes,  61. 
Xenophon,  84. 


Zeno,  the  Eleatic,  puzzles  of, 
62  /.,  789  /. 

Zeno,  the  Stoic,  145. 

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